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Is the Lord Among Us ? 




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Is the Lord Among Us ? 

By 

D. W. C. Huntington, D. D., LL. D. 

Chancellor of Nebraska Wesleyan University 



* 



CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND PYE 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



LiBRnRY of CONGRESS 


Two Copies Received 


APR 25 1904 


Copyright Entry 

a r, . . -■ <\ o * 

CLASS CC XXc. No. 


COPY B 1 



COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY 
JENNINGS AND PYE 



.HaXi 






V 



TO THE READER 



In the preparation of the following discourses, I 
have endeavored, with two exceptions, to present 
them as they have been extemporaneously delivered. 
Some illustrations have been omitted, and others 
have been reduced to a few sentences or words. I 
need not apologize for allowing myself the freedom 
of the pulpit ; for I have sought to speak rather than 
to read. The sermon on "Our Bible" and that upon 
"Doubting," though in substance often in my 
thought, have never been written or delivered until 
now. In the selection of themes, I have chosen such 
as are practical rather than speculative ; those which, 
in my judgment, are timely in view of existing con- 
ditions. If these discourses shall lead a few to 
study more thoroughly the subjects here so briefly 
discussed, they will have been useful, and that each 
reader may find something in them which shall 
prove helpful to his personal faith and his Christian 

living, is the prayer of 

THE AUTHOR. 

University P^ace, Neb., January 15, 1904. 
5 



CONTENTS 



* 



Chapter Page 

I. Has God Anything to Do with 

this World's Affairs? - - 9 

II. Consecration, .... 2 6 

III. Christians do not Live; to Them- 

selves, - - - - - 40 

IV. The Sin of Fretfulness, - - 56 
V. Our Bible, - - - - 72 

VI. Are We All Going to Heaven ? - 97 

VII. God's Estimate of Man, - - 115 

VIII. Doubting, 132 

IX. Unbelief in Christian People, 149 



I. 



HAS GOD ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS 
WORLD'S AFFAIRS? 

"Is the Lord among us or not?" — Ex. xvii, 7. 

For thousands of years the great struggle of the 
world was over the question of many gods or one 
God. Was there a multitude of divinities, each pre- 
siding over a certain portion of this world's surface 
and population, or was there one God who governed 
it all? This controversy has been the most pro- 
longed and persistent of any in history, and is by 
no means ended yet. The wars it has waged, the 
treasure it has consumed, the lives it has sacrificed, 
and the misery it has entailed surpass computation. 

The Hebrews were traditionally monotheists. 
In this they were a handful against the world. The 
bravest and the best of this world's hard work has 
been done by minorities. In this respect it is now 
as it was in the days of Noah and of the twelve 
apostles. 

9 



io Is the Lord Among Us? 

But it is not easy to keep minorities up to their 
distinguishing principles. The pressure of numbers 
is in itself very great, carrying with it popular favor 
or scorn. There were plenty of Protestants in the 
time of Henry VIII, who were Roman Catholics 
again in the reign of Queen Mary. So with the 
Hebrews; the selfish wavered and lapsed, and the 
weak halted between two opinions. 

The Hebrews called their God Jehovah ; the very 
name laid claim to the universe. In the pantheon 
of heathenism there were gods of the hills, and gods 
of the valleys ; there was a god of flies, and a god of 
wine; and so on indefinitely. The world was in its 
youth. It lived in the visible. The claims of the 
gods had to be settled by external tests. In the trial 
of miracles the gods of Egypt had fallen before the 
Jehovah of Israel. 

But a severer pressure than that of numbers or 
Egyptian power was upon the people of Israel. The 
Gentile nations had visible representations of their 
gods. Their gods were enshrined in images and 
sacred animals. They ate and drank; they spake 
in oracles; and occasionally showed themselves to 
their worshipers. The Hebrews were forbidden 
to make unto themselves any graven image with 
which to represent their God I 1 They were to believe 

* Ex. xx, 4. 



God and this World's Affairs. ii 

in One whom they could not see. This was a strain 
upon their faith. They wanted something to look at 
which should to them mean God. The severity of 
this trial may be inferred from the fact that, to 
this day, there are those who seriously think that 
a visible Christ would be nearer and more accessible 
than an unseen Savior. 

The miracles in Egypt had been witnessed; the 
sea had been divided; the manna had fallen; and 
now, as they drank from the smitten rock, they 
doubtingly say to one another, "Is Jehovah among 
us or not?" "Does this really show that the per- 
sonal presence of Jehovah is with us?" "Has no 
other god a hand in this?" "Is there no secret 
cause, unexplained to us, for this remarkable occur- 
rence ?" 

This questioning is chiefly important to us as 
revealing a tendency to doubt the presence of a 
personal God in the affairs of the world. THis ten- 
dency appears in much of the subsequent history of 
the Hebrew people. Their doubt grew to denial ; it 
led to their frequent falls into idolatry; it wrecked 
their nationality and scattered them among the 
nations. Had this tendency disappeared with the 
fall of the Hebrew monarchy, it might be passed as 
a strange fact of Old World history. But it still 



12 Is the Lord Among Us? 

exists. Over and again men doubtingly inquire 
whether God has anything to do with the history and 
life of this world. From lip to lip of scientist and 
philosopher and magazine-reader the question is 
passed, "Is the Lord among us or not?" 

We note this tendency in some of its more 
common forms. Fir st. It is seen in the efforts and 
evident desires of many to explain, if possible, the ex- 
istence and phenomena of the material universe with- 
out assigning a personal God as the efficient cause. 
They speak of "the system of nature" as if that of 
itself was sufficient to explain all the mysteries of 
matter and motion and force. Power and rational 
order are supposed, somehow, to reside in what they 
call nature. They tell us what nature does and how 
it works. With them nature is a system of things 
wholly apart from God. They think of it as going 
on by its own direction and inherent forces. If they 
allow to the Creator any part in the make-up of the 
physical universe, it is that of a mere architect and 
mechanic. He made the world and set it running; 
since which time He has been practically absent from 
it. The plan of the worlds, once drawn, they run 
on by their own self-contained energies, and the 
Creator is dispensed with as of no further necessity. 

To justify this doubting tendency, "natural law" 



God and this World's Affairs. 13 

is brought in, and the claim of Almightiness is set 
up in its behalf. "Laws of nature" are treated as if 
entities in themselves. We are told what they do, 
and how they do it. They build worlds and control 
their motions; they create and maintain order and 
uniformity in the heavens and the earth; in short, 
they do all that is done in the physical universe. 
With this class of doubters all phenomena are ex- 
plained by naming the "laws" which are supposed 
to be in operation in order to produce them. By 
this wise philosophy, God is imprisoned within the 
walls of his own laws or banished altogether from 
his creation. 

All this is, to say the least, superficial thinking. 
It is as unphilosophical as it is unscriptural. Every 
mind capable of carrying on a logical process is 
compelled to affirm a first cause. That cause is not 
nature, for nature causes nothing. It is not natural 
law, for natural law is but a name for the uniformity 
of Divine action. We have observed this uniformity, 
and so we call it law. It denotes a way in which 
God is pleased to act. In itself and apart from God 
it has no power; it does nothing; it is nothing. 
When we have discovered natural law we have 
merely found out how God does things. And shall 
we say that God does not do things just because we 



14 Is the Lord Among Us? 

have discovered how He does them? Strictly, all 
power is will-power. If it were possible to subtract 
from nature the all-pervading energy of God noth- 
ing would remain. Nature is not mere machinery, 
endowed with power of perpetual motion. A deep 
student of nature well says: "No dead mechanism 
moves the stars, or lifts the tides, or calls the flow- 
ers from their sleep ; truly this is the garment of the 
Deity; and here is the awful splendor of the per- 
petual Presence." 2 "The habits of God are the laws 
of the world." 

Second. Another manifestation of this tendency 
to atheistic doubt is seen in the notion that God was 
once more really and emphatically in the world than 
He is now. This class of doubters have a belief in a 
Supreme Being and in the Bible. They are ready 
to admit that, in the ages past, God came into this 
world's affairs, and that He wrought wonderful 
works. They believe the time was when He was on 
fields of battle; that His interposing hand wrought 
victory or defeat. They think that He once brought 
judgments upon godless nations ; that He had to do 
with famines and pestilences and all forms of natural 
evil. They are sure that, long ago, the Almighty 
thwarted or overruled the wicked ambitions of men, 



2 Quoted in Methodist Review, lxxx, p. 529. 



God and this World's Affairs. 15 

and that He seemed to manage the world much more 
vigorously then than now. They tell us what re- 
markable things were done in "old Bible times." 
They have no doubt that God was in Hebrew his- 
tory; they sigh for like evidences that He is present 
in history now. 

To them God seems more distant and more silent 
than He is represented as being in the Scriptures. 
They doubt if the Lord is among us as He was with 
the Israelites. Now battles are decided by the skill 
of the commanders, the courage of soldiers, and 
by the quality of their arms. If God has anything to 
do with them, He is painfully out of sight. 

It is true that many wonderful events are re- 
corded in Bible history, revealing the presence of God 
among men, which we do not now see repeated. 
But it does not follow that, if the Lord is among 
us, He will be manifsted in precisely the same man- 
ner in which He revealed Himself to men thousands 
of years ago. God is wise enough to adapt His 
methods to the age and changing conditions of the 
race. Would that all religious teachers were wise 
enough to follow the example. There are different 
dispensations, but the same Lord. "There are diver- 
sities of operation, but it is the same God which 
worketh all in all." 3 It is not true that God has noth- 

8 1 Cor. xii, 6. 



16 Is the Lord Among Us? 

ing to do with that which men do. Divine and hu- 
man agency do not work separately and in turn. God 
works with and in men. Providence is chiefly in 
the realm of mind. The skill of a commander, the 
bravery of soldiers or a panic in an army may have 
its cause in the unseen. To the thoughtful of this 
generation, it would add nothing to the evidence of 
the Divine Presence among men, if external nature 
should be made to echo His voice. History shows 
that there is a conservation of the Divine energy. 

In the supreme fact of the presence of God in 
the world all ages are the same. His modes of man- 
ifestation change with changing conditions; but 
all times are "Bible times." The difference between 
Bible history and other histories is not that God was 
in the events recorded in one, but not in those writ- 
ten in the other. He is equally present in both. 
Bible history is peculiar only in the standpoint of 
the writers. They wrote from the upper side. 
Could the history of the United States be written 
with the same degree of spiritual insight, it would 
be seen to be as fully permeated with Divine inter- 
positions as is any of the history which is bound into 
our Bibles. No country, no people has ever held 
a monopoly of God's presence. He discloses Him- 
self in and through all history. No doubt God was 



God and this World's Affairs. 17 

at Jericho and Ai and Beth-horon, but no more than 
He was at Poitiers and Waterloo and Gettysburg. 

It can hardly have escaped the notice of any 
Bible reader that the movement in the Divine dispen- 
sations is away from the material towards the spir- 
itual — from the symbolical to the real. The earlier 
Bible teachings were couched in symbols. The tab- 
ernacle and the Mosaic ritual were object-lessons. 
They were the primer of revelation. They "served 
unto the example and shadow of heavenly things." 4 
As the world grew there was less of shadow and 
more of substance, for the lessons advanced. To 
this day ritualism represents a bygone type. As 
a rule, the more ceremony the less spirituality. 

God gets along with as few miracles as He can. 
Those are most blest who have not seen the risen 
Jesus, and yet have believed. 5 Bible miracles are 
chiefly confined to a few epochal beginnings. That 
time is best when faith goes on without visible 
crutches, seeing God everywhere, and needing no 
miracles. The dear souls who are demanding "signs 
and wonders" in external nature as proofs that the 
Lord is among us, are wishing back a day inferior 
to their own. Such a day they will not see, for the 
wheels of the kingdom of God never go backward. 

4 Heb. xiii, 5. & John xx, 29. 

2 



18 Is the Lord Among Us? 

"God has provided some better things for us." 6 
It was expedient that Jesus should ascend out of hu- 
man sight. He did not go away from the world; 
He thus came more into its life. 

Third. The heathen philosophers taught that the 
gods took notice only of the most extraordinary 
events. Jesus taught that our Heavenly Father 
has to do with the fall of a sparrow. The tendency 
to look at this subject after the manner of the 
heathen is very manifest. Many Christians do not 
recognize God in common things. They look for 
evidences of His presence only in the unusual and 
startling. To be an intimation of the Divine Pres- 
ence, an event must be outside of all known laws; 
it must baffle human explanation. Or it is in those 
incidents which occur at critical moments in history, 
and which are afterwards seen to have been the 
hinges upon which national destinies have turned 
that certify to Divine agency. The coming of 
Blucher to Waterloo, the arrival of the Monitor at 
Hampton Roads, the rescue of the child, John Wes- 
ley, from the burning rectory; these and the like 
occurrences, which have involved consequences of 
incalculable importance, they regard as the occa- 
sional thrusts of the hand of God into this world's 



6 Heb. xi, 40. 



God and this World's Affairs. 19 

affairs. But in things familiar to us by regular re- 
currence they doubt if the Lord is among us. 

But why should an extraordinary event prove 
the presence of God any more than an ordinary one ? 
Is it the credential of the Divine Presence to be out 
of an established order? "Is an event which is in- 
side of law for that reason outside of God?" 7 Ra- 
tional order in the universe is itself proof of the 
presence of a rational God. The fact that an event 
has not been frequently observed, or that it never 
occurred but once, adds nothing to the evidence that 
God has to do with it. If from the planting of a 
peach-pit there should come the tree, the blossom, 
and the ripened fruit, all in thirty minutes, it would 
be a very extraordinary occurrence ; but if the same 
event should occur in three years' time, it would be 
an ordinary event. And can any man tell why the 
energy of God is necessary in order to the produc- 
tion of a peach in thirty minutes, but is not required 
for its bringing forth in three years ? The processes 
carried on and the work accomplished are in both 
cases the same. All that would be creative in the 
work of the shorter time would be equally so in the 
longer period. The length of time occupied in the 
process has no bearing whatever upon the question as 

7 Shall We Believe in Divine Providence ? p. no. 



20 Is the Lord Among Us? 

to the part God takes in the matter. He is as po- 
tentially present in a gradual as in an instantaneous 
creation. For aught that we know, God works as 
hard to keep a living man alive as He does to raise 
a dead man again to life. Christ is now "the Life" 
as truly as He is "the Resurrection." Paley well 
said: "I do not see anything more in the resurrec- 
tion of a dead man than in the conception of a 
child. ... To the first man the succession of 
the species would be as incomprehensible as the res- 
urrection of the dead is to us." 8 "The world is a 
Divine thought and a Divine act. Divine reason 
and Divine will are both expressed in all natural 
phenomena. The continuity of the system expresses 
simply the constancy of the Divine action. The uni- 
formity of the system expresses the steadiness of 
the Divine purpose." 9 

Remarks. 

i. There is comparatively little avowed atheism. 
The absurdities of its creed forbid intellectual rest. 
It is such a violation of the moral intuitions that the 
religious nature given to man pronounces it false. 
But there is a practical atheism which is much more 
common, and more to be dreaded. There is an 



8 Evidences of Christianity, p. 653. 9 Metaphysics, Bowne, p. 265. 



God and this World's Affairs. 21 

atheism in feeling and in sentiment ; an atheism in 
business and in politics. There is a cold unconscious- 
ness of God, begotten of unrighteous living and 
paralyzed moral sense. When we read in the four- 
teenth Psalm that "The fool hath said in his heart, 
There is no God," 10 we may note that the words 
"there is" are inserted by the translators. What the 
fool said was, "No God." It was not an expression 
of intellectual conviction, but of desire. He did not 
want any God. It was disagreeable to him to think 
there was a God. "No God for me," he said, and 
this is the worst form of atheism. 

2. Political atheism is an enemy and a danger 
to any country. Nations are as responsible to God 
as are individuals. The State is a Divine institu- 
tion. Every nation is raised up for a purpose; it 
has a providential mission to fulfill. So long as it 
takes its proper place and serves the progress of 
mankind, it is given power from on high. When it 
refuses to do its appointed work, and stands in the 
way of human well-being, it declines, and is finally 
overcome. 

"At what instant I shall speak concerning a na- 
tion and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to 
pull down and to destroy it, if that nation against 

10 Psa. xiv, 1. 



22 Is the Lord Among Us? 

whom I have pronounced turn from their evil, I will 
repent of the evil I had thought to do unto them. 
And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation 
and concerning a kingdom to build and to plant it, if 
it do evil in My sight, that it obey not My voice, then 
I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would 
benefit them." 11 

This is the decalogue of the nations. It is writ- 
ten by the finger of God upon the tables of history. 
It was no more true in the days of Jeremiah than it 
is in our own time. All God's prophets have testi- 
fied that no nation can safely carry systems of vice, 
or long endure general moral corruption. There 
were those in the days of the prophets who said, 
"The Lord will not do good, neither will He do 
evil ;" 12 that is, He has nothing to do with us anyway. 
And there are those in our time who, with less ex- 
cuse, declare that God has nothing to do with pol- 
itics. The Hebrew monarchies staggered into their 
graves under this load of political atheism, the 
influence of which was then what it is now and 
ever will be. 

3. In the light of this subject we see the char- 
acter which is demanded in civil rulers. The home, 



Jer. xviii, 7-10. ls Zeph. 1, 12. 



God and this World's Affairs. 23 

the Church, and the State are all and equally Divine 
institutions. That those who govern in the home 
and those who make and execute laws in the Church, 
should do so with supreme regard to the will of 
God, few will deny. The same is equally true of 
those who rule in the State. In the home parents 
represent God; in the Church ecclesiastical rulers 
represent Him, and civil rulers are charged with 
the same responsibilities in the State. "They are 
God's ministers, attending continually upon this very 
thing." 13 We are aware that, in modern political life, 
the Scriptural idea of the relation of the civil ruler 
to the kingdom of God is to a great extent over- 
looked. It nevertheless remains true that the makers 
and executors of human laws stand charged with 
their duties under the authority of God. No per- 
sonal ambition, no question of self-interest can for 
a moment justify in officers of State a lower aim than 
that of serving the best interests of mankind in obe- 
dience to the Divine will. A more reckless incon- 
sistency can scarcely be conceived than that of a man 
seeking political position with no higher purpose 
than personal profit or aggrandizement. If there is 
anything more godless than this it is the man who 

w Rom. xiii,6. 



24 Is the: Lord Among Us? 

uses his office, whether civil or ecclesiastical, for the 
same personal ends. 

4. There is a business atheism which is no better 
than the political. It acknowledges God in one class 
of duties and on one day of the week, but ignores 
Him in the rest. Of all the heresies extant that is 
most potent for evil which divides the life into 
sacred and secular departments. It renders business 
godless and devotion insincere. There is no good 
reason why an honest business, honestly conducted, 
should not be a means of grace. On the other hand, 
no amount of profit can make a business right which 
would otherwise be wrong. No stress of circum- 
stances can render embezzlement necessary or justify 
fraud. "Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit, 
serving the Lord." 14 

5. To ignore God, to doubt His presence, is the 
greatest blunder which can be made in individual 
life. God is interested in every human life. He would 
weave it into His Divine working. He chooses for 
each of us what is highest and best. He would lead 
us. "In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He 
shall direct thy paths." 15 To ignore Him ; to deny 
or reject Him is to part company with a Heavenly 

14 Rom. xii, 11. « Prov. iii, 6. 



God and this World's Affairs. 25 

Guide, and imperil our future for both worlds at 
once. How bleak and barren must this life be to 
those who stumble on with no realization that God 
has to do with them and theirs! Richter has well 
said that this world without God is but a ghastly 
socket from which the eye has been removed. What- 
ever else we fail to do, let us not fail, in everything, 
to "count in God." 



DE- 
CONSECRATION. 

"I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies 
of God, that ye present your bodies a living sac- 
rifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your 
reasonable service." — Rom. xii, I. 

The; writer of this epistle was a converted Jew. 
He had been a thorough student of the Scriptures, 
and he often expresses his Christian ideas by inter- 
preting the teachings of the Old Testament. It was 
all the more natural for him to do this because of the 
typical character of the old dispensation. The Mo- 
saic ritual inclosed a spiritual meaning, and Paul 
loved to point it out. 

The text is an instance in which the law of sac- 
rifice, which held such a prominent place in the He- 
brew religion, is translated into its Christian sig- 
nificance. 

The Jews divided animals into "clean" and "un- 
clean." Those offered in sacrifice must be of the 

26 



Consecration. 27 

former class. They must be taken from the herd, 
the flock, or the clean birds. 1 Each was required 
to be a perfect specimen of its kind. Diseased or 
blemished animals were not acceptable sacrifices/ 
To be accepted the animal must be presented by the 
worshiper — presented unto God. This was done, to 
be sure, through the mediating offices of the priest, 
but it was none the less the personal act of the of- 
ferer. When performed in the spirit enjoined by 
the law, it was a transaction between the offerer and 
God. 

Christianity has no priests save our "Great High 
Priest, who has passed through the heavens," 3 and 
no atoning sacrifice can now be offered. But con- 
secratory sacrifices are essential to Christian expe- 
rience and life. Every man is in duty bound to pre- 
sent himself unto God as a sacrifice. He is to be a 
whole, a holy sacrifice. He is not to be slain in his 
act of consecration ; he is to be a continual, a living- 
sacrifice. In the ceremonial of the Mosaic law, the 
blood poured out meant surrender of life — surrender 
of all. The form has passed away, but its meaning 
abides. Consecration of life with all it contains is 
and ever must be essential to living Christianity. 



1 Lev. i, 1-14. a Lev. xi, 47. 8 Heb. iv, 14. 



28 Is the Lord Among Us? 

I. But what is this consecration? 

1. It is something which we do; not something 
done for us. It is our own voluntary act and state. 
We do not mean that it is ever done without the 
gracious persuasion of the Holy Spirit; but we do 
mean that it is our doing; not that of another. 
Neither men nor angels, no, nor God Himself, can 
do it in our stead. If it were possible that others 
could do this for us, we should be none the better 
for their doing. It can not be done by any influence 
around us or upon us. Teaching may show us the 
duty; surroundings may serve as persuading and 
urging influences; but personal consecration is our 
own self-determined activity. We consecrate our- 
selves if we are ever consecrated. Prayer for the 
illumination of the Holy Spirit in our darkness, and 
for His help in our weakness is certainly very proper ; 
but prayer for consecration as that for which we 
are to wait in passive expectation till the gift is be- 
stowed, will never be answered. That is asking 
God to do what He tells us to do. God will conse- 
crate us when we consecrate ourselves. 

2. Consecration does not consist in an intellec- 
tual apprehension of the duty itself. Knowledge of 
duty underlies all intelligent religious activity ; but in 
itself it falls short of the essential element in con- 



Consecration. 29 

secration. The duty may be seen clearly, and yet the 
mind remain unchanged in its attitude of self-will. 
We may apprehend the rightness of the obligation; 
we may perceive something of the beauty and rich- 
ness of consecrated life, and still fail to present our- 
selves unto God. With our heads full of light, we 
may refuse to offer ourselves as living sacrifices. 

3. Nor is consecration any form of the religious 
feelings. It is not feeling badly; it is not getting 
happy. Consecration may exist with rapture, and 
it may just as fully exist without it. It is not to be 
identified with intensity of desire for it is not desire 
at all. It is not desiring to do something; it is not 
desiring that God would do something. It is not 
wishing that something were done nor hoping that 
something may be done. It is not getting ready 
to do something nor being willing to do something ; 
it is actually doing something. The reality of this 
self-dedication can not be too much emphasized. 
Musing, meditating, an awakened sentiment, a pass- 
ing mood, a pious wish, not one, not all these rise 
to the meaning of "living sacrifice." Consecration 
is business with God. It gets to Him through 
Christ. The marriage covenant is not more real 
than that into which a consecrated soul enters with 
God. In a soul's consecration, something is done. 



30 Is the; Lord Among Us? 

4. Consecration is not giving to God what did 
not belong to him before. It is not conferring 
favors upon Him by donating to Him liberal per 
cents of our time and worldly substance. Conse- 
cration concedes God's right to all we have and are, 
and acts upon the fact. Jonathan Edwards wrote 
in his private diary, "I have this day been before 
God, so that I am not in any respect my own. I claim 
no right to myself. I have given myself clear away, 
and have retained nothing as my own." 4 To what a 
sublime height does this self-devotion rise above 
a cold division of profits with God, or a devotional 
feeling awakened by the atmosphere of a religious 
meeting. The truly consecrated soul regards him- 
self as having wronged his Lord in everything in 
which he has failed to recognize His right to all, 
and looks upon his consecration as the beginning 
of his obedience to God. 

5. Consecration is, in its own nature, entire up to 
the measure of light. With different persons, the 
subject may be seen with very different degrees of 
comprehension. With the same persons, at succes- 
sive periods in life and experience, the matter will 
be differently viewed. Time, study, and spiritual 
growth bring deeper insight. Consecration thus 

* Journal, January 12, 1723. 



Consecration. 31 

means more; it includes more in some cases than 
in others, but it can never mean or include in any 
case less than all. With a conscious reservation, 
consecration is vitiated and ceases to be more than 
a name. 

The content of the living sacrifice may vary 
with individuals. The child has only the powers of 
a child to present, and this is the all which is re- 
quired of the child. The man in years, his youth 
wasted, reduced by sinful life to a fraction of what 
he might have been, when he presents his little all 
unto God, it is a sacrifice, holy and acceptable. 
Nothing more to him is possible ; nothing more can 
be his reasonable service. No man, no angel could 
do more, however much each might have to offer. 
Consecration may thus vary in its content; it can 
never vary in its intent. Differ it may in breadth 
and depth of apprehended meaning, as widely as 
individuals differ, but entire, as opposed to partial, 
is all the consecration there is. 

Consecration is entire also in the sense that it 
takes in all time. In purpose it offers the future 
as well as the present. A member once said to his 
pastor that he had consecrated ten of the best years 
of his life to the Lord. Eight of these years had 
already passed, so that in two more years his con- 



32 Is the; Lord Among Us? 

secration would run out. He evidently thought he 
had been very generous with his Lord, and that 
therefore he deserved well at the hands of his 
Maker. 

True consecration knows no periods of service. 
In its deepest intent it includes all of life in this 
world and in all worlds. It is the human side of 
''the everlasting covenant." The implication that 
it is ever to terminate vitiates it from the begin- 
ning. Vows devoting certain things to God, some- 
times with and sometimes without conditions, were 
practiced in the times of the patriarchs and judges; 
but there is no authority for them under the Chris- 
tian revelation. They do not rise to the plane of 
Christian consecration. 

Nor is consecration something to be used merely 
as a condition of reaching something else. It is a 
state of mind which leaves with God all conse- 
quences in this world and the next, whether they 
refer to outward conditions or inward experiences. 
Its eye is single. In its purpose and consent it car- 
ries with it the whole being to God. So long as the 
mind dwells upon what it is going to receive through 
or because of its consecration, it will be defeated in 
its self-abnegation and embarrassed in its faith. 
It will be held down to the process of bargaining. 



Consecration. 33 

Genuine consecration means to be wholly and for- 
ever right with God. There is no room for a piece- 
meal offering in the matter. There is no place for 
stipulations or questionings. There is not an "if" 
in the whole vocabulary of consecration. It voices 
one continuous and willing "amen" to all God is, to 
all He does, and to all He requires. 

6. Consecration belongs in Christian character 
as such. It is not the peculiar duty or privilege of 
a few; it is vital to real Christian experience. It 
is not optional with Christians to choose a conse- 
crated life and thus reach high attainments, or to 
remain in an unconsecrated state and live on a lower 
level of salvation. A misguided member once said 
to her pastor, "I claim to be a Christian; but I do 
not profess to be a consecrated Christian." And, 
pray, what is an unconsecrated Christian ? Possibly 
this woman did not mean all that her words would 
indicate. If she did, she must have meant that she 
was a Christian only in theory and name. "I want 
to be more fully consecrated;" "I consecrated myself 
to God some years ago, but recently I have made a 
full consecration." These statements may be very 
honestly made; but how far can they be intelli- 
gently and correctly made? (1) They may mean 
that, under the searching light of the Divine Spirit, 
3 



34 Is the Lord Among Us? 

persons were led to see that they were not in a 
state of consecration, as they had supposed them- 
selves to be. This experience is by no means un- 
usual. (2) They may mean that time and increas- 
ing light had shown them a deeper and higher 
meaning in this state than they had ever before 
apprehended. This is well nigh the universal ex- 
perience with living Christians, but if it be meant 
that entire consecration to Christ is not essential 
to an average, but real experience of saving grace, 
and is necessary only to such as would attain "the 
higher life," the statement contains a subtle, but 
serious, error. Honest differences of opinion may 
exist as to what consecration requires in outward 
life, views of the subject may be narrow or broad, 
superficial or profound, but up to the measure of his 
light, every Christian presents himself a living sac- 
rifice, holy, acceptable unto God. 

7. Consecration to God is also consecration 
to the welfare of man. It is not a state to be merely 
possessed and enjoyed and talked about. It goes 
forth in self-sacrificing activity. It labors for that 
for which Christ labors. It has hands and feet and 
tongue, all in motion for human well-being. Con- 
secrated souls can travel poor circuits, go to mis- 
sion fields, visit slums, and never say that anything 



Consecration. 35 

is hard. They do not settle questions of duty by 
what is easiest and most agreeable to themselves. 
They do not "bargain with the Master for an easy 
place, nor commute for half fare and a berth in a 
sleeping-car." 5 They willingly ache that others may 
suffer less. They work on alone if need be, more 
anxious to serve human interests than to secure 
credit for so doing. They can do little things, if 
thereby blessings come to others. "Go," said Mary 
Lyon to her pupils at Holyoke, "where nobody else 
is willing to go." 6 Consecration lives by loving 
service. It seeks the good of universal being. No 
field is too foreign if so be it may be reached. It 
gives its best to those who are degraded and for- 
gotten. It sees in every man a neighbor. Its 
zeal is not cooled by the repulsiveness of sin, nor 
inflamed by the attractiveness of a chosen few. It 
breaks through the barriers of circle and society. 
It serves God as God, and man as man. It works 
independently of all motives, save the highest well- 
being of all. It can work without human praise, and 
hold on its way in the absence of visible results or 
tidal-waves of prompting emotion. 

8. It should be noted that consecration to the 
highest good of man, according to the will of God, is 

5 Christianity in the Home, p. 204. 6 Ibid. 



36 Is the Lord Among Us? 

obedience to God. It is making choice of that 
which He chooses. The first act of consecration is 
the first moment of obedience ; it is the first moment 
in which the soul can honestly say to God, "Not 
my will, but Thine be done." 

It should not be supposed, however, that, by 
one act of consecration, the work is ended for a life- 
time. It is the soul's entrance upon a state of 
obedience. Obedience is always a duty, and that 
state is, by Divine grace, to be constantly main- 
tained. Here is the fighting-line of the Christian. 
Here we meet the solicitations of the world, the 
flesh, and the devil. To constancy of obedience are 
we called. This beginning of obedience must be- 
come a sustained consecration of life. This is not 
accomplished by a few good resolutions; it is not 
spending a few moments in devotional exercises; 
it is a plane of life far above pious spasms; it is a 
life of fiber and effect ; it is dwelling with God and 
living for man. 

Remarks. 

i. To a state of consecration saving faith be- 
comes natural. The difficulties which men experi- 
ence in the exercise of faith are not in faith itself; 
they are behind it. Sin creates fear and dread of 



Consecration. 37 

God, and in such a state of mind trust is impossible. 
Once conscious that the whole will of God is will- 
ingly accepted, faith in God through Christ be- 
comes a normal exercise of the mind. Without 
such an acceptance of the will of God, efforts to 
believe unto salvation become the wrestling agonies 
of the soul. And they are as unavailing as they 
are painful. 

2. To the consecrated soul duty becomes a de- 
light. He is in harmony with the Divine will, and 
wants it done on earth as it is in heaven. He is sat- 
isfied with the law of God, and would not have 
it changed. He is at home in God's service. 
To one who is attempting to perform relig- 
ious duties while in an unconsecrated state, the 
task is irksome and dreaded. As a rule, the effort 
will be soon abandoned. The unregenerate, in the 
Church or out, look upon religious life as drudgery. 
It seems to them a kind of penance which Christians 
are enduring in order to get to heaven. The decep- 
tion arises from their false and rebellious attitude 
towards God. They are pitting their wills against 
His. But to one who accepts the will of God, 
actively and passively, obedience to God and serv- 
ice to man are both liberty and delight. 

3. Christian consecration is manifested in a 



38 Is the Lord Among Us? 

Christlike spirit, and in unassuming activity for the 
benefit of others. This is the evidence which con- 
vinces onlookers. Very little impression for good 
is generally made upon others by personal profes- 
sion of entire consecration. If the experience be 
real, men will divine the fact without being told. 
When the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians is 
translated into a Christian life, it will not long go 
unrecognized, and the influence will be all the more 
salutary if it be coupled with humility and modesty. 
4. The time for consecration is now. It is a vol- 
untary state, and can be entered at once. All our 
pretenses of preparing to begin consecrated lives 
are only excuses for neglecting a duty which we 
should discharge at once. All waiting for God to 
do something more than He is doing, or for others 
to do or become different, or for conditions to 
change, are only makeshifts seemingly to relieve 
you from this most pressing obligation. You say 
the greatest and the best thing possible for you is to 
have His help now. He will never help you more 
than He does now. You say it is a great thing 
thus to enter into a solemn dedication of your all to 
God. So it is, and you should make haste to do 
the greatest and the best thing possible for you, 
in time or eternity — present your bodies a living sac- 



Consecration. 39 

rifice, holy, acceptable unto God. No matter where 
you are. You may be in your home while you read 
these lines. Your home is a good place in which 
to begin this only real life. You have no need or 
right to wait for something special in your priv- 
ileges or surroundings. Admiral Foote, when a 
midshipman, while walking the deck of his vessel 
on a starless night, voiced his self-consecration in 
the words, "Henceforth I live for God." 7 At that 
hour his whole life swung into line with God, and 
so he remained to the end of his useful career. On 
the night of his twenty-second birthday, Charles 
Kingsley wrote, "Before the sleeping earth and the 
sleepless sea and stars, I have devoted myself to 
God, a vow never to be recalled." 8 This personal 
consecration was the crisis in the lives of these great 
and good men. It will be the turning-point in yours. 
It opens the heart to the Holy Spirit. The world 
never looks to one afterwards as it did before. Its 
deceptions are exposed, and the power of its fascina- 
tion is broken. The nearness and loving mercy of 
God, the infinite value of man, the heinousness of 
sin, and the glory of salvation overshadow, in their 
stupendous importance, all other realities. Your 
time is now. 



fHomiletic Review, xi, p. 213. 8 Ibid. 



III. 



CHRISTIANS DO NOT LIVE TO THEM- 
SELVES. 

"For none of us liveth to himself" — Rom. xiv, 7. 

It is evident that the apostle did not mean to be 
understood as saying that there are no persons in 
the world who live to themselves. He knew the 
world too well ever to have made such a statement 
as that. There is a sense in which every life touches 
and influences others, and is thus not wholly within 
itself; but that is not the subject which is discussed 
in this chapter. Paul is seeking to correct certain 
evils which were disturbing believers in his time, 
and which arose out of too exclusive regard for 
individual opinions and technical rights. He insists 
that Christians do not make that which is personal 
to them the supreme motive of their lives. They 
live for the highest good of all. They live and 
die for that for which Christ lived and died. 

He allows that good men may differ widely in 
40 



Christians do not Live to Themselves. 41 

many things and yet be equally accepted of God. 
The Jew may keep his feast-days for conscience' 
sake. He thus keeps them unto the Lord. The Gen- 
tile may neglect them altogether, but must not, for 
that reason, be judged a sinner. One may refuse 
certain meats from the conviction that it would be 
sin to partake of them. Another may eat them at 
will without scruple or condemnation. (Verse 3.) 
Both may be serving God; both are accepted of 
Him. One must not judge the other. 

But the apostle insists that, with the possibility 
of all these differences among Christians, there is 
one respect in which they do not differ — they do 
not live to themselves. "None of us/ 3 he says, "liv- 
eth to himself." Christian life and self-centered 
life are opposites and mutually exclusive. Life in 
which self-interest or self-pleasing is the ruling fac- 
tor is not Christian life. He is a Christian who 
lives unto the Lord ; chooses what the Lord chooses ; 
lives for the end which He seeks. 

I. With us all there are points of danger in 

THE DIRECTION OF THIS SELF-CENTERED LIFE. 

I. We bring into the world an inheritance of 
animal nature. We are thus compelled to begin our 
activity under the law of self-gratification. Appe- 



42 Is the Lord Among Us? 

tite develops in advance of the idea of duty. We 
act from inherited impulse and awakened appetite 
before we know any higher law. When the fact 
of obligation becomes known and the idea of duty is 
developed, there is a conflict between the sugges- 
tions of appetite and the claims of duty. The first 
habit ever formed is in the unconscious surrender 
to the principle of self-indulgence. Activity has 
taken that direction, and the life has become quickly 
organized under the rule of self-pleasing. 

To become Christian in the New Testament 
sense, this rule of self-gratification must be re- 
nounced and broken. There must be conscious, vol- 
untary acceptance of the claims of duty as expressed 
in the will of God. To continue Christian this re- 
versed attitude of the mind must be maintained. 
The change is a radical one. It is a change of mas- 
ters. The reign of self is broken and the will of 
Christ is installed as the law of our activity. There 
is danger that, having begun under the law of self- 
gratificat'on, we shall refuse to make the change. 
Having made the change, the clamor of appetite 
still exists, and there is danger that we may again 
fall under its solicitations. There is danger that we 
may be bribed by the world or decoyed by the flesh 



Christians do not Live to Themselves. 43 

and the devil. Primitive bent and habit are over- 
come only through the abounding grace of Christ. 

2. Danger exists in the fact that we are com- 
pelled to live in the atmosphere of selfish life. There 
is much of social life in which the many live for no 
higher end than self-pleasing. Self-interest is 
largely king in the business world. It organizes 
trusts, and "corners" fuel and bread-stuffs. It sells 
whisky and drinks whisky for greed and self-indul- 
gence. It seduces and betrays that it may gratify 
lust. It cheats, and then says, "That was his look- 
out ; I am not running his business." It breaks the 
commandments of God and justifies the sin by the 
fact that "there is money in it." It says, "I know 
it is not just right, but it pays well ; we must all 
have a living, you know." It practices what Satan 
preached when he said to Jesus, "Command that 
these stones be made bread;" that is, "God has left 
you forty days without bread; He may leave you 
to starve; you must have a living you know, and if 
you can not get it in God's time and way, get it 
in your own; any way, so that you get a liv- 
ing." In public affairs self-life too often makes 
personal interests rather than the general good its 
supreme object. The schoolhouse must not be built, 



44 Is the Lord Among Us? 

however much it may be needed, because taxes will 
be increased. The Church must be placed where 
it will suit personal convenience, or, perchance, en- 
hence the value of certain portions of real estate. 
Self-life ofttimes runs riot in political affairs. Not, 
who is the ablest and best man, but, "What will he 
do for me?" Not, should the law be passed, but, 
"How much is there in it?" 

These and such like manifestations show us that 
selfishness is in the air. There is danger that men 
will continue to yield to its enticements, and that 
Christians will drift away from an unselfish con- 
secration of life. None but healthy bodies resist at- 
mospheric influences. Living in the atmosphere of 
self-centered life, Christians and Churches must be 
wholly and persistently consecrated or they will ab- 
sorb the contagion. Vocations may be easily ac- 
cepted from which selfish gains are gotten, but 
which do not serve the well being of society. Legit- 
imate business may be carried on by unfair and dis- 
honest methods. Such business life is selfish; it is 
unchristian. Do we call our money our own? Do 
we use it as we please, without reference to tEe 
claims of God or the welfare of our fellows ? Then 
are we living to ourselves. Do we spend it freely 
upon our tastes or appetites, but very sparingly, if 



Christians do not Live to Themselves. 45 

at all, upon that which promotes the higher and 
wider interests of mankind — the school, the Church 
and its various benevolences? Then are we still 
held in the grip of the old life of self. There is 
danger here. 

3. This danger is increased by the fact that liv- 
ing unto one's self is quite commonly regarded as 
not essentially wicked. It is never commended, 
never justified in others, but by many seems to be 
looked upon more as an inevitable defect of human 
nature than as any state which involves sin. The 
human mind is incapable of approving selfish acts ; 
it is compelled by its own laws to approve and even 
admire that which is truly benevolent. And yet 
supreme regard for personal interest or pleasure, in 
disregard of universal well-being, passes as in- 
volving at most but a slight blur upon Christian 
character. 

The fact is, living to self and refusing to live 
unto the Lord, is the one all -comprehensive sin. 
It is that which distinguishes a sinner from a saint. 
Its manifestations may be various, but supreme re- 
gard for self-pleasing comprehends them all. Arch- 
bishop Trench tells us that the zvord selfishness is 
young, but that "the thing is as old as the devil." 1 

1 Study of Words, p. 144. 



46 Is the Lord Among Us? 

He thinks it possible that the tempter of our first 
parents was moved to his wicked suggestions by the 
fear that man, if left in obedience, would rise to be 
chief among the creatures of God, and thus out- 
rank him. If Satan sought personal aggrandize- 
ment by planning the overthrow of a rival, he did 
only what human beings have done many times 
since he lived to himself; that was all. And if 
the first woman chose the gratification of her cu- 
riosity and her appetite rather than obedience to 
the command of God, she did the same thing on a 
less-elevated plane. 

This self-centered life is the bottom element in 
all forms of crime. The swindler, the burglar, the 
seducer, the murderer, commits his crime in order 
to realize the gratification of his own desire. He re- 
fuses all care for the rights or interests of others. 
The particular form which his self-centered life takes 
on we call crime ; but underneath all its forms is the 
same supreme concentration upon himself. Every 
criminal law was made for the purpose of restraining 
and punishing those who refuse to regard the rights 
of others, and insist on making their own desires the 
supreme law and end of their lives. 

4. The danger of falling into this open gulf of 
life unto self is increased by the fact that there are 



Christians do not Live to Themselves. 47 

types of religious teaching which serve to strengthen 
and foster the evil, rather than to uproot it. Mo- 
tives are often brought to bear upon men to induce 
them to take steps towards a Christian life, which are 
simply appeals to their selfishness. They are told 
how happy they will be if they will make a start 
in religion. They are pointed to their failure to 
realize happiness in the directions in which they 
have sought it. They are exhorted to try this good 
way of getting happy, which has never failed. If 
men believe and act upon such considerations only, 
their self-life will remain unchanged. They will be 
still getting something for themselves. If they are 
told to give themselves to the Lord, so long as they 
understand this to be merely an expedient for get- 
ting something from Him, real self-renunciation 
will be impossible. The religiousness of such will 
consist in a religious dress upon the old self-life. 

Persons are told that if they will only become 
Christians they will, besides escaping a horrible and 
wrathful destiny in the world to come, have a share 
in the best and most beautiful place in the universe, 
after they can stay here on earth no longer. To 
those who have spent their energies in getting the 
best things possible for themselves, this becomes a 
fascinating view. They have not to change the 



48 Is the Lord Among Us? 

radical aim of their lives; they have only to turn 
it in a different direction. They are still getting 
something for themselves. Their religious life ex- 
hausts itself in getting and holding on to the evi- 
dences that they are going to heaven when they die. 
It is far from our thought to make little of the 
awful future of the finally impenitent; nor would 
we for a moment treat with indifference that day 
of wondrous glory in which "the righteous shall 
shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Fa- 
ther." 2 These are great truths to be preached, and, 
if possible, appreciated. But we do contend that 
the state of mind in which thought and desire are 
centered and absorbed in securing a personal gain, 
is not a state admitting of genuine repentance or 
consecration. It is a state which makes no room for 
God. At its core it is the old self-life turned into a 
religious channel. Persons led into the Christian 
profession under the sway of this self -profiting 
motive very soon betray the superficial character of 
their change. Their Church life is conducted on the 
principle of getting what they can from the Church 
for their own benefit, rather than of giving their 
lives for the promotion of its evangelizing work. 
They are not willing and joyful givers of their 



2 Matt, xiii, 43. 



Christians do not Live to Themselves. 49 

substance, for they have never given away them- 
selves. They are sensitive to any want of recog- 
nition or appreciation. If moved to activity, it must 
be by some inducement which, directly or indirectly, 
touches self-interest. It will not be strange if they, 
unconsciously to themselves, seek to make their re- 
ligion itself a form of self-indulgence. They know 
little or nothing of self-denial. Their ultimate object 
is to get to heaven, and they want to be religiously 
happy as evidence that they are on the way to 
heaven. They want to make sure of getting to that 
land of rest and music and companionship with those 
who have gone on before. They like a religious 
meeting in which they have "a good time." They 
like preaching which makes them feel good. In 
class-meeting they seldom get above or beyond how 
they feel and how they enjoy themselves. They 
are wont to estimate the piety of others by their 
degree of emotional fervor. Their prayers cling 
tenaciously to what is nearest to themselves. What 
wonder that many in the Church are as worldly and 
as penurious as before their religious profession! 
They are attempting to be Christians for gain. They 
have never been brought to love what God loves. 
They still live to themselves, though practicing some 
religious duties. They have been misled, and their 
4 



50 Is the Lord Among Us? 

peril lies in the fact that they do not discriminate 
between self-renunciation and awakened religious- 
ness. They do not see that the rule of self-life, 
in whatever form, is incompatible with genuine piety. 

5. We are not maintaining that one's own in- 
terest should have no place in his activity. We in- 
sist only that it should be held in its proper place ; 
that it should be regarded according to its relative 
value. No individual interest is of equal value with 
the highest good of all. So say our civil courts ; 
so says the Bible. No man has the right to make 
of himself a supreme end. He is a part of a greater 
whole. His rights are limited by the general wel- 
fare; his interests are subordinated to the highest 
well-being of all. He is to love God supremely, 
and his neighbor as himself. Self-life would re- 
verse this command, so that it would read, "Thou 
shalt love thyself supremely, and God and thy neigh- 
bor not at all." 

6. This view is supported by the fact that living 
unto self proves the ruin of the highest and best 
powers of man. It arrests development in the di- 
rection of all that is noblest and best. Self-con- 
sciousness in an orator insures his failure. Till he 
is sufficiently interested in some object outside of 
himself to render him self-forgetful, his gifts will 



Christians do not Live to Themselves. 51 

fail him, though trained in all the arts of the schools. 
No poet can command his muse so long as the end 
he seeks is money or fame. Inspiration never comes 
till it can displace self-consciousness. A prize of 
five thousand dollars was once offered for the best 
poem which should epitomize the history of Amer- 
ican slavery, the object being to install the pro- 
duction as a new national hymn. In a year's time 
the committee of award examined upwards of two 
thousand manuscripts, but only to report that not 
one of them was of sufficient merit to take rank 
as a national hymn. The wealthy Quaker who 
offered the prize replied, "I am afraid those poets 
were first of all after the five thousand dollars." If 
his judgment was correct, the secret of their fail- 
ure was revealed. No poet, whatever his gifts, could 
write appreciatively of slavery so long as his object 
was gain. The poet of slavery would have to feel 
in himself its unutterable woes. The agonies of the 
slave would have to enter his own soul. But self- 
centered life can not take on the sorrows of others. 
A poem must be born, and there is no motherhood 
in the life unto self. Ministerial abilities and use- 
fulness often decline from the same cause. The 
pastor who occupies a field of labor for what he can 
get out of it, rather than for what he hopes to do 



52 Is the Lord Among Us? 

for it, is stricken with mental and spiritual paralysis. 
It matters not whether the field is one to be desired 
or to be dreaded; it matters just as little what nat- 
ural or acquired abilities the preacher brings to it; 
no power from on high will overshadow him till he 
is able to say, "I seek not yours, but you." 3 But 
when, in unselfish consecration to the welfare of 
his people, he loves as Jesus loved, the fire of God 
will move his teeming thoughts and flame from his 
willing lips. The greatest and best possibilities of 
any man can not be developed under the rule of 
selfish life. 

The same law holds in reference to religious ex- 
perience. A self-regarding state of mind, though 
taking the form of personal piety, is superficial and 
unhealthful. No man has any right to make his 
own spiritual excellence his supreme end. The 
higher life does not lie in that direction. All Chris- 
tian attainments are for service, not for personal 
possession and enjoyment. They are means to a 
higher end. Religious experience "to have and to 
hold" eludes its would-be possessor. Holiness, like 
happiness and heaven, is missed by making it the 
supreme object of pursuit. "He who, wishing to be 
a saint, strives only to be a saint, will never, so 

3 2 Cor. xii, 14. 



Christians do not Live to Themselves. 53 

striving, become a saint." 4 There is danger that 
the old getting attitude may intrude itself here. 
Self-life is a subtle fiend; it can wear the garb of 
necessity or of prudence or of piety. A devoted 
missionary once wrote an article on "The Idolatry 
of Christian Experience." The title is strikingly 
suggestive. Spiritual power, like force in nature, is 
known only in its effects. The Christian who thinks 
himself possessed of large measures of spiritual 
power, and yet nothing comes of it, is mistaken. He 
has identified spiritual power with his own feelings. 
Those most blest with the might of the Spirit are 
often least conscious of the fact. Spiritual power 
is the result of getting into line with God, not per- 
suading Him to come into line with us. 

The law of all degrees of spiritual life is the 
law of self-sacrifice. This is not sacrificing for self ; 
it is the sacrifice of self. There is a legendary say- 
ing that the clay of which man was originally made 
was moistened with tears. It suggests the truth 
that the one ground virtue from which all other vir- 
tues spring is the sacrifice of self. "He who in time 
is nearest Christ crucified will in eternity be nearest 
Christ glorified." 5 The life of Jesus stands as the ' 



4 Permanent Elements in Religion, p. 38. 
'Morison, Commentary on Mark, p. 295. 



54 Is the Lord Among Us? 

one perfect instance of holy self-sacrifice, and we are 
Christians in the degree in which we are like Him. 
He gave, He suffered, He died, and all for others. 
He died, not only on the cross; He died all the 
way down to the cross. "He saved others" was the 
great truth concerning Him, unwittingly confessed 
by those who mocked Him. More wonderful than 
His miracles was this undeviating devotion of Him- 
self to the welfare of others. "Let that mind be in 
you which was also in Christ Jesus." 8 

Remarks. 
i. Self-centered life is everywhere the great dis- 
turber of human happiness. It defeats itself and 
keeps its victims forever upon the rack. It collides 
with others' interests, and God is in its way. It de- 
stroys the peace of the home. It leads husbands to 
be indifferent or unkind to their wives, and wives 
to regard their husbands only as the chief of their 
own conveniences. It underlies suits for divorce. 
It leads children to demand that the whole of the 
family arrangements shall be managed with refer- 
ence to their personal pleasure. It breeds social 
jealousies and neighborhood quarrels; it breaks up 
Church choirs; scrambles for the chief seats in the 
synagogues, and sets Church members to praying, 

e Phil, ii, 5. 



Christians do not Live: to Themselves. 55 

"Lord, grant that we may sit on Thy right hand and 
on Thy left in Thy kingdom." 7 It leads Diotrephes 
to love the pre-eminence. It is to the credit of the 
religion of Christ that selfishness can not live in 
peace with it. 

2. A word to that reader who is not a Chris- 
tian: Do you not see, in the light of this subject, 
the reason why you are not a Christian? It is not 
because you are not sufficiently orthodox; it is not 
because the Church members in your vicinity do not 
live as they should; it is not any one of the subter- 
fuges by which you have sought to relieve yourself 
from the duty of immediate repentance. The reason 
is one, and can not be more. It is that you started 
out in your life under the law of self-pleasing, and, 
up to this time, you have refused to change and ac- 
cept the law of duty. You have insisted on having 
your way instead of taking God's way. Had you 
reversed your attitude, ceased living to please your- 
self, and honestly sought to please God, you would 
have found Christ and Christ would have found you 
long ago. And now, if, while you read this page, 
you will tell God in your heart of hearts that He 
shall have His way with you henceforth and for- 
ever, you will find a forgiving Savior while this 
book is in vour hand. 



Mark x, 



IV. 

THE SIN OF FRETFULNESS. 

"Cease from anger and forsake wrath; fret not thy- 
self in any wise to do evil." — Psa. xxxvii, 8. 

King David was an old man when he wrote this 
psalm. He says, "I have been young, and now am 
old." 1 His life had been an eventful one. His ex- 
periences had been more varied than often come to 
one man. He had a hardy boyhood. He knew the 
exposures of a shepherd, and the snares which sur- 
round a courtier. From a shepherd-boy he became 
king of one of the greatest nations of the time. He 
fought more battles than Hannibal or Napoleon. 
He was a statesman, a poet, and a reformer. 

When young he was but little thought of in his 
father's family. When a prophet announced to Jesse 
that there was a predestined king among his sons, 
the father had not one thought that this honor could 
fall upon David. In his public life he was in turn 
loved and hated, admired and envied, trusted and 

1 Psa. xxxvii, 25. 

5& 



The; Sin of Fretfulness. 57 

betrayed. He had felt the sufferings of a hunted 
fugitive, while for years he was hiding from his 
king with a price upon his head. He had walked 
among the subtle dangers of being petted by a na- 
tion and courted by neighboring rulers. His life 
seems never to have been out from under some 
severe strain. To him promises and prophecies were 
delayed in their fulfillment; wealth, success, and 
popularity tried his bravery more severely than bat- 
tle. He was compelled to know the great deeps of 
domestic sorrow, and he sounded the profoundest 
depths of shame and penitence in view of personal 
sin. This much is certain : David had his full share 
of the difficulties, the vexations, and the cutting 
trials of human life. 

When such a man speaks to us from his 
mature years and wide experience, he is entitled 
to a hearing. His words are messages which w r e 
need. This is not the only psalm in which he ad- 
mits that he had felt keenly the temptations to mur- 
muring, anger, and fretfulness. He knew that 
earnest life would bring the same to all who would 
come after him, and out of the chastened spirit of 
an aged saint, just entering the sunset of life, he 
warns us against giving place to an irritated and 
fretful state of mind. 



58 Is the: Lord Among Us? 

I. We, too, have our temptations to ereteue- 

NESS. 

I. Temptations to this sin may arise from bodily 
conditions. An overtaxed nervous system will fur- 
nish a ready occasion for irritability of temper. 
Improper habits of eating, producing indigestion 
and sleeplessness, beget fretful feelings. Referring 
to his chronic dyspepsia, Thomas Carlyle said, 
''When Satan, in the form of bile, was heavy 
upon me, I have said cruel things, and bitterly, 
though vainly, do I recollect them." 2 Coated stom- 
achs and torpid livers have often clouded the minds 
and depressed the spirits of persons both good and 
bad. Men who work when they should sleep, eat 
by no rule but appetite, and use tobacco and beer, 
will fall into depression and ill temper at least half 
the time. Not a few of God's dear children worry 
over their frequent wrestlings with the unbelieving 
suggestions of the devil, when the fiends which they 
should most resolutely resist are late hours, mince 
pies, and plum puddings. Such is the influence of 
physical states upon the mind that feelings of de- 
spondency and discouragement naturally arise from 
bodily disorders. They multiply fears and change 
the color of everything. They breed jealousies, and 

SFroude's Life of Carlyle, i, 147. 



The Sin of Fretfulness. 59 

lead to hard words and lawsuits. Many good peo- 
ple would enjoy religion much more than they do if 
they would shape their habits to wholesome rules in 
dietetics. Neglected and abused, our bodies turn 
upon us with scorpion stings. In this day of light 
there is such a thing as Christian health. A sancti- 
fied soul in an unsanctified body, if indeed it is 
possible, is certainly superficial. 

2. In some constitutions there is an excessive 
love of order which may furnish the temptation to 
fretfulness. So far as this is a constitutional trait, 
it is in itself innocent, but it opens the way for un- 
numbered annoyances. Persons of a mathematical 
turn are especially exposed in this direction. They 
love system and exactness. They can not easily bear 
what is heedless or disorderly. Work done without 
rigid method pains and disgusts them. They care lit- 
tle for shade-trees and cornfields if the rows are not 
straight. So much of this world is out of order 
that they live in continued mental torture. They 
would spend their lives in putting things in their 
proper places, but only to see them out of place 
again. They suffer and are sorely tempted to fret. 

3. All forms of active life bring their temptations 
to fretfulness. Business men often meet with the 
selfishness and meanness of human nature. They 



60 Is the Lord Among Us? 

deal with those who will deceive for a shilling, break 
their promises, and neglect their payments with lit- 
tle consciousness of wrong-doing. Ministers, when 
doing their utmost to save time, will be visited by 
callers who come in just for a chat because they have 
nothing else to do. Prayer-meetings are now and 
then smothered by some wise brother who takes 
the time of a dozen others in order to expound his 
peculiar views, and exhibit his unconscious con- 
ceit. Men who devote their lives to the study of a 
favorite subject come to regard an interruption as 
the unpardonable sin, but interruptions they will 
have. Students, in the midst of their studies, will 
be bored by listless companions who waste their 
own time, and are ready to kill the time of others. 
Teachers will come in contact with pupils on whose 
dullness explanations and repetitions will be lav- 
ished in vain, and others whose sharp wits will be 
expended in the invention of vexatious tricks. No 
vocation is exempt from these provocations to fret- 
fulness. The higher the ideals of life, the more ex- 
alted the sense of honor, and the more sensitive and 
refined the nature, so much the more keenly are 
these temptations felt. 

4. Temptations to fretfulness may come from 
expecting too much from this world. It is the illu- 



The Sin of Fretfulness. 6i 

sion of the child that he sees something a little way 
beyond him, which, if he could but possess, his cup 
of blessing would be full. This illusion of the child 
becomes the delusion of the adult. Great expecta- 
tions are cherished as to what the next acquisition 
will bring — that increase in wealth, that new 
house, that coveted position, that anything upon 
which the heart is set as the condition of its bless- 
edness. If ideas of life are formed from the reading 
of fiction, the matter is still worse. Such ideas em- 
body the unreal, and will not be realized in actual 
life. The young woman who becomes a bride in 
the belief that she has for a husband the hero of 
her most fascinating love-story, will learn to her 
unutterable surprise and disappointment that he is 
an average human being. The young man whose 
mental picture of womanhood has been painted by 
the hand of romance will suffer a similar mortifica- 
tion. In their mutual chagrin they give way to fret- 
fulness, and thus make the bad still worse. Mean- 
while the chief fault in the case consists in the fact 
that they both expected from this world what was 
never in it. This way of expecting blessedness from 
the things of this world is the way of dissatisfaction 
and failure. It is a heavy load to carry; it makes 
the spirit bitter and fretful. God never made a hu- 



62 Is the Lord Among Us? 

man soul to be satisfied with things. Its rest must 
be found in Him, or it will be found nowhere. And 
who will be likely to bear such a lifelong cheat 
without fretting? All searchings and strugglings 
for a substitute for God will and must end in fail- 
ure, and so long as this struggle continues, so long 
failure and mortification and fretfulness will be 
likely to continue. 

5. The temporal circumstances of many furnish 
the occasion for the temptation to fretfulness. They 
have little or nothing laid by for the future, their 
families are dependent upon them for bread and 
clothes and education. Some are in impaired health, 
and live in dread of the day when they will no 
longer be able to provide for the wants of those 
dependent upon them. They have come to know 
that age is sapping their strength, and, as they have 
all they can do now to earn a living, they worry as 
to what can be done to keep the wolf from the door 
when they shall be able no longer to labor. This 
is no fancy picture. The cases are numerous. Fret- 
ting seems to them inevitable. They think it im- 
possible not to give way to it. They are sure that 
those who talk about fretting as a sin do not under- 
stand the pressure which is upon them. 

Others who have been accustomed to plenty have 



The Sin of Fretfulness. 63 

been reduced to a fraction of their former means, 
and they fret as bitterly over the loss of accustomed 
luxuries as their neighbors over the lack of necessi- 
ties. And even those who have more than enough 
for themselves are often as unhappily anxious lest 
future losses bring them to poverty. Still others fret 
themselves over the mystery of the unequal distri- 
bution of providential blessings. They see many 
others, no better than themselves, sharing more 
largely this world's good, and they are "envious at 
the foolish when they see the prosperity of the 
wicked." 3 

6. Many good people fall into divers tempta- 
tions to worry and fret over their religious states. 
They see themselves so far below their ideals ; their 
attainments are so meager ; the good they have done 
is so very little, and their efforts to help others 
have so signally failed. They think their religious 
life exceptionally discouraging. They have diffi- 
culties which others seem to escape. They hardly 
know whom or what to blame ; but they worry about 
their spiritual state in the present and their hopes 
for the future. 

We are not now pointing out the meaning of 
this state of mind, though it has a meaning. Nor 



8 Psa. lxxii, 3. 



64 Is the .Lord Among Us? 

will we stop here to show that worrying and fretting 
never increase spirituality or help a soul out of 
darkness into light. We only mention this doubting, 
chaotic religious state as the occasion of sore temp- 
tation to fretfulness. We have referred to these 
different sources of temptation, not to deny their 
reality or to make little of them. They are very 
real and very trying. But we do maintain that 
there are good reasons why we should not yield to 
these temptations, and if such reasons do exist, 
they are the promise that we may have gracious 
and all-sufficient help in overcoming them. 

II. Some reasons why we should not yield to 

THE SIN OF FRETFUENESS. 

1. It never does any good to be fretful. No 
interest of our own, either of body or mind, is ever 
served by it. It does not render us more wise in 
perplexity or more brave in difficulty. It does not in- 
crease in us the spirit of prayer, much less that of 
thanksgiving. Nor does it ever benefit others. It 
never corrects the fault of a child, a scholar, or a 
neighbor. It never wins a friend nor subdues an 
enemy. It is dead loss from beginning to end. 

2. On the contrary, it does much harm. It in- 
jures one's health. The state of mind which is ex- 



The Sin of Fretfuexess. 65 

pressed in fretfulness is not a normal state. It is 
a fire in the nervous system which burns up its 
force. It is the eating friction which wears away 
the machinery of life. Many who are credited in 
their obituaries with having died of hard work, 
have done their work at unseasonable hours, much 
of it under artificial excitement, and in the haste 
of impatience and fretfulness. The human consti- 
tution will stand an enormous amount of hard work 
if it be done seasonably and cheerfully. It is well 
known that milk will turn sour during a thunder- 
storm. A fit of anger is a cyclone in the human 
system. Under its influence certain fluids become 
acid, and even poisonous. Chronic fretfulness pro- 
duces kindred results. 

It is equally unhealthful to the mind. It adds 
another pang to those w r hich already exist. It stands 
in the way of dispassionate judgment. It is hasty 
where deliberation is demanded. It reduces courage, 
and is incapable of calm and persistent effort. In 
the spiritual life it is "the sin which doth so easily 
beset us.''* It is the enemy of Christian peace. It 
wounds our confidence and puts us upon our faces in 
shame and self-reproach before God. It grieves the 
Holy Spirit. It conveys to others an unfavorable 

*Heb. xii, i. 

5 



66 Is the Lord Among Us? 

impression as to the genuineness of our piety, and 
thus hinders our usefulness. Men flee from a rancid 
and fretful spirit. In fifty years I have not known a 
cynical and fault-finding Church member to lead 
a soul to Christ. A fretful spirit renders unhappy 
all who come in contact with it. Saint and sinner 
alike regard it as inconsistent with the religion of 
Jesus Christ. 

3. Fretfulness dishonors God. He reveals Him- 
self as our Heavenly Father. He has assured us of 
His loving care. He wills our highest possible good. 
At inconceivable cost He has manifested His inter- 
est in us, and has pledged Himself in holy covenant 
to supply all our real needs. He has bid us take 
knowledge of His care of the birds, and then asks, 
"Are ye not much better than they ?" 5 It is He who 
has said, "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee." G 
Did He not see you in all your trials and cares when 
He made these promises? Do they not mean you 
now ? How it must grieve His infinite heart of love 
to see His children elbowing their way along as if all 
His assurances of protection meant nothing! Shall 
we treat Him as the heathen treat their gods, as 
indifferent to human interests except when bribed 
to take notice of them? What dishonor should we 
bring upon our homes if we thus complained and 

6 Matt, vi, 26. 6 Heb. xiii, 5. 



The Sin of Eretfulness. 67 

fretted under the government and care of our 
earthly fathers! Earthly life was never designed 
for mere jollying; we are here to achieve character. 
Earthly trials are for heavenly discipline. Shall we 
arraign His wisdom, and defeat His loving purpose 
in our discipline? 

4. Fretfulness is proof of existing self-will. 
We fret because we want something which we have 
no evidence that God wants us to have. We are not 
satisfied with His arrangements for us. We have 
some schemes of our own, and we complain because 
He does not adopt them. We think we could im- 
prove upon God's plans in our cases. No doubt we 
reject this statement in our theories ; it strikes us as 
both ludicrous and profane, and so it is. But when 
we worry and fret about things which we can not 
prevent, and which come to us in the course of 
Divine providence, do we not say it all in our 
practice ? 

5. Jesus our Lord was never fretful. He saw all 
the weaknesses of His disciples, and all the wicked- 
ness of the world; He felt them all as much more 
deeply than we do as He was greater and holier than 
we are, but He did not fret. He met ingratitude in 
its most astounding manifestations ; He was patient 
with unreasoning ignorance and besotted supersti- 



68 Is the: Lord Among Us? 

tion; He was made the curse of hypocrisy and the 
jeer of the rabble, but not one fretful word escaped 
His lips. And we are Christians! Surely this is 
reason enough why we should not yield to tempta- 
tion and live in the sin of fretfulness. 

III. But how shall the Temptations to Fret- 
fulness be Overcome? 

i. Not by the mere force of our own wills. Good 
resolutions alone, though piled never so high, will 
not prove availing. The question of the philosoph- 
ical possibilities of the human will need not here be 
discussed. It is enough for us to know that God 
neither asks nor expects us to overcome any sin in 
our own strength alone. He seeks to unite our 
activity with His, our weakness with His strength. 
Redemption from sin does not leave God and man 
separated, but united in purpose, and in energy of 
life. I venture to say that you have attempted this 
conquest of yourself by force of will alone more than 
once already, and you have not succeeded. But 
your failures have just prepared you for the true 
way for overcoming temptation. 

2. It will be helpful to cultivate the grace of 
thankfulness for mercies in the past. We should not 



The Sin of Fretfulness. 69 

dwell exclusively upon what God has withholden 
from us, but much upon what He has given to us. 
Call to mind the fact that God has always been better 
to us than our fears, and that many times that of 
which we have complained has been for our highest 
good. Gather from the past the lesson that, if we 
could see what God sees, and if we are right with 
Him, we should undoubtedly wish to have His deal- 
ings with us just what they are. "In everything 
give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ 
Jesus concerning you." 7 

3. Though we shall not overcome the tempta- 
tions to fretfulness by the force of our wills alone, 
we can not too strongly insist that our wills be fully 
surrendered to God's will. We must have no in- 
terest counter to or separate from the kingdom of 
Christ. When the will of Christ is our will, there is 
little in any world to worry about. Fenelon says: 
"From the moment you give up all self-will, and 
seek nothing but what He wills, you will be free 
from restless anxiety and forecasting; there will be 
nothing to conceal, nothing to bring about. Short 
of that you will be uneasy, changeable, easily put 
out, dissatisfied with yourself and others, full of 
reserve and mistrust." 8 



' 1 Thess. v, iS. 8 Letters to Men, p. 264. 



70 Is the Lord Among Us? 

4. Avoid living in a state of excitement upon 
any subject whatever. Cultivate the habit of calm- 
ness and "self-recollection." True zeal for God is 
not religious fever nor physical vehemence. We 
are doubly exposed to temptation when we are in 
an excited state of mind. We are then more easily 
clouded in judgment and thrown off our guard. 
He who lives upon religious exhilaration will walk 
among snares and perilous reactions. 

5. But "this is the victory that overcometh the 
world, even our faith." 9 Christ accepted, accepted 
constantly, is our strength against all sin. Christ 
in us, Christ as our life, is our overcoming power. 
The victory is His, though it be won in us. Jesus 
did not fret when visibly among men; He will not 
fret in us. It is He, not a blessing which will bring 
to us overcoming power. It is not an experience; 
it is the Personal Christ who keeps us. "He that 
hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son 
of God hath not life." Suffer not your faith to be 
diverted one hair's breadth from Him. We need 
Him, and we need nothing besides. What He will 
do and how He will do it is His business, not 
ours. Receive Him as He offers Himself now. To 



1 John v, 4. 



The: Sin of FretfuIvNess. 71 

that weak, stumbling, self-accusing disciple, He of- 
fers Himself without price or reward. We need 
the whole of Christ, each one, the whole of Christ 
to himself. The whole of Christ each one can 
have. Accept Him now, and you shall find that all 
the wealth of God's promises are "in Him, yea, and 
in Him are, Amen." 10 



10 1 Cor. i, 20. 



V. 

OUR BIBLE. 

"The grass wither eth, the flower fadeth, but the 
Word of our God shall stand forever." — Isa. 
xl, 8. 

The prophet here contrasts the transitory na- 
ture of all things human with the permanence and 
everlasting certainty of the Divine promises. The 
Apostle Peter quotes this passage. He, too, dwells 
upon the withering and fading character of earthly 
glories, as set over against the Word of the Lord, 
which endureth forever, and he adds, "This is the 
Word which, by the gospel, is preached unto you?' 1 
What was promise to the prophet was fact to the 
apostle. Promise and fact are the pillars on which 
our Christian faith rests. They are the two Testa- 
ments of our Bible. Both promises and facts em- 
body the Word of the Lord. They tie the Testa- 
ments together. They have given to our Bible a 
history of its own, and many traits peculiar to itself. 

1 1 Pet. i, 25. 

72 



Our Bible:. 73 

I. Our Bible is remarkable among books for its 
age. Here it is, and it has been here a long time. 
Our fathers and mothers and all their known ances- 
tors read this book. Almost three hundred years 
ago, forty-seven scholarly men, nominated by the 
two great universities of England, spent nearly four 
years in making a new translation of this book for 
the use of English-speaking people. Their pains- 
taking work gave to us our "Authorized Version," 
which we have all learned to love so dearly. There 
had been several other English versions before this 
time. Among them was that of William Tyndale, 
which appeared in 1534. A century and a half 
earlier, dear old John Wyclif translated the 
whole Bible from the Latin into English. Alfred 
the Great must have had this book, for he wrote a 
paraphrase of the Ten Commandments, and under- 
took to bring other parts of the Bible into the An- 
glo-Saxon language, but died before the work was 
done. Another century and a half backward, 
Venerable Bede was at work translating, and fin- 
ished the Gospel of John while dying. Back fur- 
ther, to the very dawn of English literature, and 
Caedmon was there paraphrasing parts of the Bible 
in Anglo-Saxon. 



74 Is the Lord Among Us? 

But the Bible was in other lands and in other 
tongues before it reached England. Our New Tes- 
tament was so extensively quoted by the writers of 
the first three centuries, that Lord Hailes, of Scot- 
land, gathered out of their writings nearly the whole 
of its contents. The enemies of Christianity, in 
their earliest attacks, referred to our Gospels as 
accredited Christian documents. There are more 
than five thousand references to passages in the 
New Testament by one of the Church fathers who 
began writing before St. John had been dead a hun- 
dred years. Justin Martyr, who wrote in the first 
half of the second century, quotes and alludes to a 
hundred and eighty passages which are found in 
the four Gospels. These Gospels were read in the 
Churches in Asia Minor, Syria, Northern Africa, 
and all the countries bordering on the Mediterra- 
nean. They were universally received as of apos- 
tolic authority. Polycarp quotes thirty-six passages 
from the New Testament in his short epistle, and 
he had been a Christian eighty-six years in A. D. 
165. So here we are, in the lifetime of some of the 
apostles, with men who quoted our Bible as we 
quote it, and believed it as we believe it. Here 
we have in our hands the statements of men who 
lived when Jesus Christ lived, men who heard what 



Our Bibus. 75 

He said and saw what He did. Here we have the 
record of what the apostles preached, and the truth 
for which they died — the Word of God which, by 
the Gospel, is preached unto you. 

2. This long life of our Bible has been beset 
with storms and trials. It has withstood the 
changes of thousands of years, while every possi- 
ble effort has been made to destroy it, and to un- 
dermine its authority. When we think of what has 
come and gone, lived and perished during this time, 
we may count its preservation as a struggle for ex- 
istence, and a survival of the fittest. Nations by 
the score have disappeared from the maps of the 
world; civilizations have changed from the most 
simple to the most complex, and boastful institutions 
have withered as the grass. They have perished, 
but this book remains. It has been assaulted by 
all forms of infidelity, from that of the scoffer to 
that of the scholar. Its extinction has often been 
determined and as often predicted; but it has lived 
on. Decrees of emperors and bulls of popes have 
doomed it to destruction; it has been made fuel 
for public bonfires by angry zealots and bigoted 
ecclesiastics; men have been forbidden to read it 
upon pain of damnation; but from threats, and 
prophecies, and fire, it has come forth unhurt. Tyn- 



76 Is the; Lord Among Us? 

dale was compelled to leave his country in order 
to complete his English translation, and such was 
the state of things in Europe at that time that he 
was not safe even in Holland. Hunted, betrayed, 
imprisoned, and strangled, the dead body of this 
godly man was burned in order to heap every pos- 
sible indignity upon one who had dared to give 
the Bible to the people in their own tongue. Like 
John at Patmos, he suffered "for the Word of 
God and the testimony of Jesus Christ." 2 He had 
done what he could to answer the prayer which he 
offered with his dying breath, "Lord, open the 
king of England's eyes." 3 It was not enough that 
the brave and faithful Wyclif had been dead 
and buried more than forty years; he had trans- 
lated the Bible from an unknown tongue into the 
language of the English people, and his bones were 
taken from the grave and burned, the ashes being 
thrown upon the waters of the "Swift." The ashes 
were swifter than the stream; for they went "from 
the Severn to the sea," 4 the heralds of the Bible 
in a hundred tongues. The fires of persecution 
have been terrific, and the rack of criticism has been 
unsparing; but our Bible has lived through and 
triumphed over all. 



1 Rev. i, 9. 3 Int. Eng. Hexapla, p. 63. * Wordsworth. 



Our Bible. 77 

3. Our Bible is peculiar among books for the 
living energy which has accompanied it. For some 
reason, people love this book as they love no other. 
Those who study it never tire of it. Other books 
are read once or twice and laid aside; this one is 
read daily for a lifetime, and increases in its power 
to interest and enrich the reader. This Word of 
the Lord is "the sword of the Spirit" 5 in personal 
reformation and salvation. In it every man sees 
himself. It strikes home. It is ancient, but it is 
young. No other book so accuses and condemns 
you; no other so relieves and exalts you. It hunts 
out every man's secret sins, but leads him to One 
"who takes away the sin of the world." 6 Tried 
souls find in it guidance in perplexity and consola- 
tion in suffering. The devout prisoner who, in his 
dark cell, was allowed a light only for eating his 
meals, chose to use the light for reading his Bible, 
though he ate his food in the dark. Its promises 
have been on the lips of burning martyrs from the 
earliest days. It is found on the breasts of dying- 
soldiers and at the pillows of departing saints. 

Our Bible has proved a saving health to the 
nations. The greatest queen of modern history 
could say to a visiting prince, as she passed a copy 

6 I$ph. vi, 17. 6 John i, 29. 



73 Is the Lord Among Us? 

of the Scriptures to his hand, "This is the secret of 
England's greatness." Scotland and Ireland are 
side by side in the same seas, both peoples were 
originally of the same Celtic stock. The one ac- 
cepted the Bible and built the character of her 
people upon it; the other rejected it, and imbibed 
its faith as it filtered through mediaeval Latin. Their 
histories reflect their different relations to the Word 
of God. Our Bible is the book which the Puritans 
brought to the shores of New England, and on its 
principles they laid the foundations of "a Church 
without a bishop, a State without a king." 7 An- 
drew Jackson may not have been a saint in charac- 
ter or in speech, but he spoke with the clear vision 
of a statesman when he said, "That book is the 
rock upon which our republic rests." 8 "No great 
man has wrought among his fellows, no nation has 
made history, except under the influence and in- 
spiration of these books we call the Bible." 8 

Not alone those who read the Bible for its aid 
in their devotions; the lists of those who feel and 
acknowledge its unique excellencies include those 
of all classes and callings, the per cent of scholars 
and public benefactors being notably large. Pa- 
triots like Patrick Henry, Washington, and Lin- 

i Rufus Choate. 8 what Noted Men Think of the Bible, p. 38. 

9 W. R. Harper in Bib. World, xxii, p. 324. 



Our Bible. 79 

coin have borne witness to their faith in its Divine 
teachings. Men of letters resort to this book as 
soldiers turn to their magazine for ammunition. 
Masters in art and song have gathered from it the 
themes for their most exquisite pieces. Students 
of Shakespeare have found that in more than five 
hundred instances that immortal bard has quoted 
or woven into his allusions passages from the Bible. 
The editor of the New York Sun pronounces the 
study of the Bible an indispensable part of the ed- 
ucation of a journalist. In addressing a society of 
journalists, he said: "There is, perhaps, no book 
whose style is more suggestive and more instructive, 
from which you may learn more directly that sub- 
lime simplicity which never exaggerates, which re- 
counts the greatest events with solemnity, but 
without sentimentality or affectation; none which 
you can open with such confidence and lay down 
with such reverence." And I will add the view of 
Sir William Jones, whose name is so prominent in 
the history of English literature. He says of our 
Bible: "It contains more true sublimity, more ex- 
quisite beauty, more pure morality, more important 
history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence 
than can be collected from all other books in what- 
ever age or language they may have been written." 



80 Is the Lord Among Us? 

4. It has often been noted that, though our 
Bible is a collection of books, it is in the truest 
sense one book. Viewed as we view other books, 
we might naturally anticipate that it would be a 
volume of fragments, without unity of subject or 
plan. Between the earliest and latest portions six- 
teen hundred years intervene. The writers lived in 
different countries ; they were surrounded by diverse 
customs ; and were under differing systems of gov- 
ernment ; few of them ever saw each other. A work 
of sixty-six parts, written by some fifty different 
persons, separated widely from each other in time 
and place, including the varieties in mental con- 
stitution and training usual in such a number, we 
might easily expect would present a medley of 
themes and views. These fifty writers are, some of 
them, in early manhood, and others in old age ; they 
differ in vocation and social rank from the plow- 
man to the king. Some were uneducated; others 
possessed the learning of their time. The book 
contains nearly all forms of literature. Here are 
prophecy and history, prose and poetry. Its poetry 
is sometimes didactic, sometimes lyric, and is not 
without its touches of the dramatic. It speaks in 
allegory, and is matchless in its parables. It deals 
with every-day life, and discusses the most pro- 



Our Bible;. Si 

found subjects which have ever occupied the 
thoughts of men. It introduces speakers the most 
diverse in thought and character, speakers who talk 
from heaven and earth and hell. There are chap- 
ters which breathe in the most charming simplic- 
ity, and others which mount up in the loftiest flights 
of Oriental imagery. 

And yet, underneath all this variety, and above 
all these conflicting conditions, there is a oneness in 
this book which is hard to find in other productions. 
li has an historic track which it follows with unde- 
viating fidelity. We may call it the history of a 
chosen people, the history of other peoples being- 
given only as they are related to the fortunes of the 
Hebrews. In a broader sense it is the history of 
the development of the kingdom of God in the 
earth. Higher yet, it is the history of the self- 
revelation of God to men. The Old Testament 
anticipates the New. It closes with the long, loud 
blast of the prophetic trumpet, sounding across four 
hundred years of silence, and proclaiming, "Be- 
hold, I send My Messenger, and He shall prepare 
the way before Me." 10 The New Testament pre- 
supposes the Old; for who could understand the 
Gospel by Matthew or the Epistle to the He- 

10 Mai. iii, i. 
6 



82 Is the Lord Among Us? 

brews, if Moses and the prophets had not written? 
Prophecy and fulfillment, type and antitype bind 
our Testaments together in one. Like the cherubim 
in the holy of holies, they touch their wings to each 
other, while they are overshadowed by the glory of 
the Divine Presence. The doctrine of our Bible 
is essentially one. Everywhere man is a sinner; 
Christ is a Savior. Its theme is God in Christ 
reconciling the world unto Himself. It begins with 
Christ in creation, and ends with His everlasting 
coronation. It has been well said that the several 
books of "Paradise Lost" give less evidence of hav- 
ing been the product of a single mind, than do the 
sixty-six books of the Bible. As in nature, moun- 
tains and seas, suns and sand-grains are held in 
one system by the pervading presence of the only 
God, so our Bible in all its parts constitutes the 
"sundry times and divers manners in which God 
spake in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, 
and hath in these last days spoken unto us by His 
Son." 11 

5. Along with this essential unity, our Bible 
presents a process of continued development. It 
has been a growth. The book itself was once small. 
It contained at most but a sixth part of what it now 



"Heb. i,i. 



Our BiBivE. 83 

includes. Its contents are equally marked by move- 
ment. True to God's method in nature, its teach- 
ings rise from the lower to the higher. In them 
we have the record of the progressive revelation of 
God. This revelation is contained in centuries of 
history; it grew as the world grew. In the child- 
hood of the race God spake as unto children in 
symbols and prohibitions. This was the "law which 
came by Moses." It dwelt prominently upon sin. 
It was to bring the world under conviction, and 
thus prepare the way for the "grace and truth which 
came by Jesus Christ." 12 The earlier conceptions 
of God given in the Old Testament, though far 
above the degrading views of the heathen nations, 
fall below the revelation in Him "who is the bright- 
ness of His glory and the express image of His 
Person." 13 What patriarch ever began his prayer 
with "Our Father who art in heaven?" In the 
Biblical idea of sacrifice we begin with slaughtered 
animals; we rise to "the sacrifices of God, which 
are a broken spirit," 14 and we reach a climax in Him 
who "humbled Himself and became obedient unto 
death, even the death of the cross." 15 

In the Old Testament views of death, we seem 
to stand in the atmosphere of uncertainty and dread. 



"John i, 17. 13 Heb. i, 3. " Psa. li, 17a. « Phil, ii, 8. 



84 Is the Lord Among Us? 

Good men prayed to live long on the earth. They 
regarded long life as a special token of Divine re- 
gard. In the New Testament no man offers prayer 
for an extension of his earthly life. Believers are 
"confident and willing rather to be absent from the 
body and to be at home with the Lord." 18 Views 
of the future life under the old dispensation cor- 
responded with the ideas of death. Indeed, proofs 
of the fact of future life in the Old Testament are 
few and hard to make plain and positive. We seem 
to look through a haze of mystery into a land of 
silence. The rewards of piety appear to cluster 
around the gifts of providence in this world. In 
the clearer light of New Testament teaching we 
catch a brighter view. Here the worlds are near 
each other, and Christ the Lord brings them into 
fellowship. No intimation is given that religion 
and worldly prosperity are necessarily united; but 
Christians consent to become pilgrims and stran- 
gers, "knowing in themselves that in heaven they 
have a better and an enduring substance." 17 In the 
first books religion is closely bound to ritualistic 
observances; in the latest, "God is a Spirit, and 
they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit 
and in truth." 18 

Our Bible is a development, not only in doc- 



2 Cor. v, 8. (R. V.) " Heb. x, 34 ; xi, 13. " John ir, 24. 



Our Bibi<ic. 85 

trinal concepts, but in ethical standards as well. 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were good men — the 
best of their time; but judged by New Testament 
standards, they would have been nearer the peni- 
tentiary than the Christian's heaven. Jephthah 
maintained a standing with God in the dark days of 
the Judges, though violating the principles of Chris- 
tian morality in shocking cruelty. Even David, in- 
spired though he was, could hardly have caught 
sight of the lofty standard of life given in the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, or have conceived of a kingdom 
of God which is "righteousness, peace, and joy in 
the Holy Ghost." 19 

These lines of development in our Bible are so 
many illustrations of the fact that methods of God 
in nature and methods of God in revelation coin- 
cide. They were conceived in the same mind and 
wrought out by the same hand. The secret within 
this progressive movement is the fact that both 
nature and the Bible are the records of the self- 
revelation of God. Our Bible is the history of the 
unfolding of the Divine purpose and Person. From 
the cherubim at the gate of Eden to the New Jeru- 
salem, which comes down from God out of heaven, 
it is the story of the manifestations of God in the 

w Rom. xiv, 17. 



86 Is the: Lord Among Us? 

Eternal Son. Through the long centuries of this 
history, Christ is ever present, and Christ is still 
coming. He is forever the coming One. 

6. Our Bible is a Divine-human book. Like the 
ladder in Jacob's dream, its top is in heaven, and 
its foot rests upon the earth. It came from God, 
and it came through men, — men used, not as dead 
machinery, but as responsible personalities in the 
normal exercise of their faculties. "Men spake from 
God, being moved by the Holy Spirit." 2 * But in 
moving them to speak, the Holy Spirit did not de- 
stroy their essential character as men. They were 
still men and under human limitations. Inspiration 
did not turn them into mere talking and writing 
machines; it uplifted them to catch the thought of 
God, and moved them to speak what they thought. 
In this speaking, their mental peculiarities, their 
surroundings, and their degrees of spiritual eleva- 
tion, all entered as shaping factors into their ut- 
terances. This human element in our Bible, so far 
from detracting from its inspiration, exalts it to a 
higher plane. It is not a Divine clairvoyance in 
which the natural operation of the faculties is sus- 
pended; it is not the mechanical control of the 
tongue or the hand; it is the inbreathing of the 



20 2 Pet. i, 2i. (R. v.) 



Our BiBivE. 87 

Spirit of God by which the sacred writers were 
more Divine, and all the more normally human. 

It has been insisted by many that, in order to 
defend the authority of the Scriptures, it must be 
maintained that inspiration extends to every line 
and word. If such inspiration be possible, it 
could not, of course, apply to our English Bible, 
for all versions are translations by men who claim 
no inspiration beyond what every good man may 
have in his religious work. And, had we in our 
hands the very manuscripts which were written by 
evangelists and apostles, such a mechanical type 
of inspiration would be neither necessary nor de- 
sirable. It is doubtful, even, if it could be justly 
called inspiration. Bishop Atticus Haygood, than 
whom no abler defender of Holy Scripture has 
recently written, says: "Had it been necessary, in 
order to give man saving truth, God would, we 
can not doubt, have used holy men as mere pen- 
points. In that case, however, holy men would not 
have been necessary; one man would have done as 
well as another, provided only that he wrote a good 
hand." 21 According to this view of inspiration, the 
writers of the Bible were mechanical instruments, 
their own thoughts and experiences and characters 

« Jack-knife and Brambles, p. 168. 



88 Is the L,ord Among Us? 

having no real influence upon what they wrote. 
This view of their relation to their Divine mes- 
sages is evidently not claimed by the writers them- 
selves. Its advocacy in the Church does not date 
back of the seventeenth century. Our Protestant 
fathers were confronted by the claims of infallible 
councils and an infallible pope. They thought it 
necessary to set up the standard of verbal inspira- 
tion in order to sanction their appeal to the infalli- 
ble book. It came into the Church as a supposed 
polemical necessity. The theory provides for no 
possible degrees of inspiration. It awards the same 
degree of Divine help to a writer in copying a 
genealogical table from Jewish records, or in re- 
lating a fact coming under his own observation, 
that it claims for the writers of the prophecies of 
Isaiah and the Epistles of Paul. It fails to account 
for the fact, so patent to all readers of the Bible, 
that each writer has a style and vocabulary peculiar 
to himself, a style touched by an individual cast 
of mind, by the customs of the time and place in 
which he lived, and even by the vocation which 
he followed. This theory can give no explanation 
of the freedom with which the writers of the New 
Testament handle the Scriptures of the Old. In 
the numerous quotations which they make, little 



Our Bible. 89 

attention is generally paid to verbal accuracy, the 
stress being placed upon the meaning and its ap- 
plication. If all their words were selected for them 
by the Holy Spirit, no reason can be given why 
the same facts, when recorded by different writers, 
should not have been written in the same language. 
Even the writing of Pilate over the head of the 
crucified Savior, recorded by all the evangelists, and 
in all cases meaning precisely the same, is not alike 
in words in any two of the Gospels. The different 
evangelists place the same event in different rela- 
tions, varying as to what immediately preceded it 
and what followed it. This does not indicate ver- 
bal dictation, but that freedom of mental operation 
through which each writer recorded that which had 
impressed him most deeply, and which he recalled 
most vividly. 

In mistaken zeal, some have gone so far as 
to claim that the vowel-points in the Hebrew Bible 
were placed by direct inspiration, though it is well 
known that the system of vowel-points and accents 
was not invented till the fourth century of the 
Christian era. 22 

It has been said that, if one error of any kind 
could be found in the Bible, its claim to inspiration 

22 Hist, of the Bible, Kitto, p. 40. 



9o Is the Lord Among Us? 

and divine authority would be overthrown. This 
must mean that, if the apostles were inspired, they 
were thereby incapable of error in any mental process. 
They could not make a mistake in solving a math- 
ematical problem, in quoting a Greek poet, or in 
citing the words of an Old Testament prophet. 
These desperate conclusions are the logical outcome 
of* a theory which is equally desperate. God does 
not turn men into things by revealing to them His 
truth concerning the plan of salvation. Nor does 
He, in giving His truth to the world, descend to 
the plane of heathen oracles and spirit mediums. 
Inspired men studied; they "searched diligently" 
for the purpose of ascertaining what "the Spirit 
of Christ which was in them did signify." 23 The 
Prophet Daniel, though most blessed of all with 
visions and revelations, "understood by books" the 
meaning of other prophetic utterances. 24 God used 
Daniel's mind, and Daniel used his own mind. God 
and the prophet did not work separately and in 
turn; they worked in unison, and the point of in- 
spiration was the point of their meeting. 

This theory of mechanical inspiration needlessly 
exposes our Bible to criticism, and gives to its ene- 
mies their most favorable grounds for attack. The 

b »iPet. i, 11. 2* Dan. ix, 2. 



Our Bibi^. 91 

jibes and scoffs of Thomas Paine, and the sarcasm 
of Robert Ingersoll derive their force chiefly from 
the notion that inspiration is direct, verbal dictation. 
They light upon variations in different accounts of 
the same event; they find quotations inaccurately 
made; they see that the science of the Biblical 
writers was the science of their times, and they 
assume that anything in phraseology or mental con- 
cept on the part of these writers which can not be 
squared with the latest canons of criticism, proves 
their claim to inspiration false, or charges a blun- 
der upon the Almighty. This reasoning is falla- 
cious; the conclusion is wholly gratuitous; it is not 
contained in the premise. It overlooks the fact 
that an inspired man is one who is under Divine 
illumination, but who is still a man. He is not 
omniscient, nor does he possess any other of the 
natural attributes of God. Bishop R. S. Foster has 
stated the case admirably when he says: "While 
there is abundant evidence that the Bible is char- 
acteristically a divinely-inspired book, it would be 
the height of absurdity to suppose it inspired in 
every word. Nor does this affect the truth of any 
word; the uninspired parts may be as true as the 
inspired parts." 2 * We ought certainly to be thank- 

25 Studies in Theology (Prol.), p. 260. 



92 Is the: Lord Among Us? 

ful that we have a Divine-human Savior, and we 
may well give thanks also that we have a Divine- 
human Bible. Wherever this human element may 
appear, it in no way detracts from the ever-in- 
creasing evidence that our Bible is the Word of 
God. 

Remarks. 

i. Our Bible is the Book, Many books are 
needed in the minister's study, — more than are gen- 
erally found there; but the Book for the study is 
the Bible. It is the Book for the pulpit; it is the 
Book for the pews. It is lamentable that so few 
religious books are read in the homes of even Chris- 
tian people; but no other book or books should be 
allowed to crowd out the daily reading of this one 
book at every fireside in the land. It is the book 
for the prayer-meeting and the Epworth League 
service. And if our class-meetings — now suffering 
a Babylonian captivity for the idolatry of religious 
feelings — are ever restored and rejuvenated, it will 
be by banishing the sentimental platitudes, — how 
I feel, what I have attained, what more I desire for 
myself — and bringing in what the Word of God 
says, intelligently explained, and lovingly and faith- 
fully applied. 



Our Bible. 93 

2. This subject suggests the true attitude of the 
ministry and Church towards what is known as 
"the higher criticism." In the thought of many 
the phrase is a name for hostility to religion, and 
subtle methods for overthrowing the faith once 
delivered to the saints. This is far from the truth, 
and the wholesale manner in which these Biblical 
students are often denounced, without discrimina- 
tion or knowledge of their work, is a wrong to them, 
besides creating the impression that Christians fear 
to submit their sacred books to the scrutiny of mod- 
ern investigators and methods. There is little doubt 
that the pious horror which good people have man- 
ifested lest the Bible should be demolished at the 
hands of eminent scholars has helped to increase 
the doubt which they have so deeply regretted. 

It is true that some of this class of critics have 
proved unfriendly to religion. They have attacked 
the very foundations of our faith. They have de- 
nied the supernatural, and have treated our Bible 
as a fragmentary compilation of Old World liter- 
ature. We have no desire to apologize for their 
views. They are the extremists, such as attend 
every new movement of thought. But many who 
are included among higher critics are able and de- 
vout men, as well as scholars of eminence in their 



94 Is the; Lord Among Us? 

chosen lines. The Christian faith is dear to them, 
and they have reached their conclusions in pains- 
taking and prayer. In such an epoch of intellectual 
quickening as is now upon us, it could not be ex- 
pected that the Bible and its claims would escape 
the methods of criticism which are being applied 
to everything else. Nor would such an exemption 
of our Bible from the tests of modern scientific 
methods be desirable, even if it were possible. The 
Christian believer should never fear the results of 
honest investigation concerning the Bible or Chris- 
tianity; he thus reveals the weakness of his faith. 
Some things may be shaken, but only that the things 
which can not be shaken may remain. 

Higher criticism is no new or strange thing. 
It has arisen at every period of marked intellec- 
tual advancement. Whether or not there were two 
separate documents compiled by Moses into the 
Pentateuch, was discussed by a learned Doctor of 
the Church in the sixteenth century. Martin Luther 
and John Calvin handled the books of the New Tes- 
tament with a freedom which would startle the 
Christian critics of our time. Every commentator 
works in higher criticism. He seeks to find out the 
authorship and date of certain books in the Bible, 
and this is the work of the higher critic. Every 



Our Bible. 95 

student of the Bible is a higher critic. If he 
seeks a reason why the apocryphal books are ex- 
cluded from the canon; if he endeavors to find 
out who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews; if he 
asks how the account of Moses' death stands 
in Deuteronomy; if he tries to place the Psalms 
in their historical settings ; if he wishes to get more 
information concerning the Book of the Law which 
was found in the temple in the days of Josiah; 
if he works at these questions, or any one of a 
thousand others, he is in higher criticism despite 
himself. 

And what is the harm in raising these ques- 
tions? And what has the result to do with the 
Bible as a revelation of God? What matters it 
whether Paul or Apollos or Barnabas wrote to the 
Hebrews? Since the Bible does not tell us who 
did write it, and all three were "good men and full 
of the Holy Ghost," it is all right any way. What 
has the religion of Christ lost if the book of Isaiah 
was written by two prophets instead of one? The 
second part is more full of evangelical truth than 
the first, so why not thank God for the holy man 
whom our critics call "The Great Unknown ?" What 
if Paul could not remember how many he had bap- 
tized at Corinth? There are many ministers now 



96 Is the Lord Among Us? 

who would give greater evidence of inspiration if 
they would cease counting converts, and go on 
preaching the gospel as Paul did. What if Paul, 
in quoting from the Old Testament, did once write 
"three and twenty thousand," 28 for "four and twenty 
thousand?" 27 Would it have disproved his inspi- 
ration if he had blundered in repeating the multi- 
plication table? And what if Moses gathered some 
existing documents into his part of the Old Testa- 
ment? Would not any man of common sense have 
done the same if they were what he wanted? 

Let us welcome all searchers after truth as our 
fellow-workers. On every man who finds out a 
truth which we have not before found, let the 
Church of God pronounce a blessing. That, too, 
without one fear that our Bible or our Christianity 
will suffer as the result, knowing that whatever 
withers and fades, the Word of our God will stand 
forever. To those who would use the Biblical re- 
searches of our time to weaken if possible our faith, 
and do our Bible dishonor, with loving pity we will 
say: 

" Hammer away ye hostile bands ; 
Your hammers break ; God's anvil stands." 



*» i Cor. x, 8. " Num. xxv, 9. 



VI. 

ARE WE ALL GOING TO HEAVEN? 

"Then said one unto Him, Lord, are there few that 
be saved?" — Luke xiii, 23. 

We are not told who this "one" was who asked 
this question ; we do not know upon what occasion 
it was asked ; the motive of the inquirer is not defi- 
nitely stated. Not unlikely he meant by the word 
"saved" what many people now mean by the same 
word — a holy and happy place to which good peo- 
ple go when they die. 

The teachings of Jesus had disturbed this man. 
His ideas of the kingdom of God, and of the condi- 
tions of entering it were new to him. They seemed 
to sweep away the prospects of getting to heaven, 
at least to all but a few. He feared for himself. 
He wanted to know if this was really Jesus' view 
of the case. Possibly an element of curiosity en- 
tered into his question. He seemed to think that our 
Lord could tell how many would reach heaven, as 
life insurance companies calculate death rates. 
7 97 



93 Is the; Lord Among Us? 

The answer of Jesus was not of a nature to re 
lieve him. "Strive to enter in," — look to your 
self, and let alone your speculations as to how 
many will get to heaven. Strive — put your whole 
soul into the work of your present salvation. Easy- 
going, half-hearted efforts will fail. Make haste to 
attend to this at once. Doors may be shut; crises 
in life may be noiselessly passed, and may serve to 
settle the whole question of salvation. 

It would appear to be the notion of many that 
the Bible is largely a treatise on heaven and hell. 
Careful reading will, we think, convince us that, 
in the sense in which these terms are popularly 
used, there is very little in the book about either. 
The Bible emphasizes present relations to God and 
present spiritual states. The tendency to read into 
it a great deal in reference to the future life is 
very manifest. Not unfrequently passages of Scrip- 
ture which are plainly descriptive of present condi- 
tions and states, are quoted as giving the secrets and 
glories of the future world. 

The phrases, "kingdom of heaven," and "king- 
dom of God," which we find so frequently in the 
New Testament, are by many conceived to mean 
something which is indefinitely removed from us 
in time, and correspondingly distant in space. They 



Are We Ahh Going to Heaven? 99 

would make it outward in form, Jesus Christ, a 
visible Monarch with Jerusalem as His capital — 
a view cognate to that of the Jews in the days of 
Caiaphas. This, of course, carries with it the con- 
clusion that the kingdom of heaven is not yet set 
up, in fact, not yet in existence. Others, with as 
little Scripture authority, would make the phrase 
mean the abode of the righteous dead, somewhere 
among or beyond the stars. Now, the kingdom of 
heaven has been long in existence; it is here in 
this world. Souls come into it by a new birth — by 
being "born from above." 1 In numbers, it is yet a 
minority, and so we pray "Thy kingdom come," 
meaning "Thy will be done in earth as it is in 
heaven." 2 We pray to "our Father," who, though 
in heaven, is nearer to us than any other can be. 
"The kingdom of God is within you." 3 It is "right- 
eousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.'"' 4 Be- 
lievers are already in the kingdom of heaven, and 
need go no more out forever. 

The terms "save," "saved," and "salvation" are 
used in the New Testament to denote, not the con- 
dition of the finally glorified, but the spiritual con- 
dition of regenerated souls here. It is that which 
we may neglect; 5 it is received by faith here; 6 it is 

1 John iii, 3. 2 Matt. vi, 10. 3 I,uke xvii, 21. 

4 Rom. xiv, 17. 6 Heb. ii, 3. 6 1 Pet. i, 9. 



ioo Is the; I^ord Among Us? 

a present experience; 7 and now is the day of sal- 
vation. 8 

The "heavenly places," 9 which are mentioned 
several times in the Epistles of Paul, and which 
are often alluded to with index finger pointing up- 
wards, as if to locate them among the celestial 
spheres, are the Christian privileges and experiences 
which Jews and Gentiles equally enjoy under the 
gospel. Christians of all classes were sitting to- 
gether in these heavenly places when Paul was 
writing. The phrase is the translation of a noun 
in the plural number. 10 The heavenly places aro 
only the "heavenlies," in which believers live in this 
world. And the "Mount Zion" and the "City of the 
Living God, the heavenly Jerusalem," with the "in- 
numerable company of angels," 11 are the gospel 
privileges and realities to which Christian believers 
"are come." They are the Mount of Beatitudes 
as opposed to the mount which "might be touched," 
and which was "blackness and darkness and 
tempest." 12 

How often, when the mysterious glories of the 
heavenly world are set forth as surpassing human 
thought, do we hear quoted in support of this truth, 

7 Eph. ii, 8. 8 2 cor. vi, 2. 

9 Eph. i, 3, 20; ii, 16 ; iii, io ; vi, 12. 
Mile-Stone Papers, p. 229. "Heb. xii, 22. '« Ibid., rii, 8. 



Are We All Going to Heaven? ioi 

"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have en- 
tered into the heart of man, the things which God 
hath prepared for them that love Him." 13 There is 
no doubt of our inability in our present state fully 
to know the realities of the heavenly world, but 
this truth is not taught in this text. There is not an 
allusion to anything other than the realities which 
are made known to the Christian in his spiritual 
life. Whatever these things are which so transcend 
human investigation, it is expressly stated in the 
next words, that "God nas revealed them unto us 
by His Spirit." The truth taught in this passage 
is one of surpassing moment. It is that the unre- 
generate man forms no proper conception of spir- 
itual realities. He knows nothing of acceptance 
with God or of communion with Him. He has no 
consciousness of Him or of His presence. These 
are "the things of the Spirit," and "he can not know 
them because they are spiritually discerned." 14 All 
these realities, unknowable to "the natural man," 
are in the experience of Christians in this world. 

The Book of Revelation is regarded by many 
as specially full in the information which it gives 
concerning heaven. On the contrary, it contains 
exceedingly little concerning this subject. In its 

18 1 Cor. ii, 9. li Ibid. t ii, 14. 



102 Is the Lord Among Us? 

sublime imagery, many of the scenes which are 
made to pass before us are laid around the throne 
of God. It is from heaven that the forces emanate 
which guide the vast panorama of events there de- 
scribed. The events themselves are in the life of 
the Church and the world, though they are seen 
at the seat of power. Those who find in this book 
that the heaven of the saints is a literal city, fif- 
teen hundred miles long, fifteen hundred miles wide, 
with walls of equal height, miss the one great truth 
in the picture, viz., that the cube is a symbol of 
perfection, and that the time will come when the 
Church of God will be thus perfect. The holy of 
holies in the temple was a cube ; it was the dwelling- 
place of God — His dwelling-place among His peo- 
ple on the earth. The spiritual Church is His tem- 
ple now. The new Jerusalem is not built up from 
the earth; it "comes down from God out of 
heaven." 15 It is here on the earth, and if any will 
insist that it is a city of the dimensions stated, they 
will allow us to be thankful that "the gates shall 
not be shut," 18 for who, with the instincts of hu- 
manity, could endure such an incarceration? We 
are moving too slowly, to be sure, towards "a new 
heaven and a new earth," according to the Revela- 



Rev. xxi, 10. ^Ibid., xxi. 25. 



Are; We Aix Going to Heaven? 103 

tion. 17 Every evil that falls, every soul that is re- 
newed, brings us a little nearer the new earth, 
"wherein dwelleth righteousness. " When the tri- 
umphs of the cross shall be complete, 

"And not one rebel heart remains 
But over all the Savior reigns," 

then will the new Jerusalem have come down from 
God out of heaven ; the new heavens and new earth 
will be realized; then shall it be said, "Behold the 
tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell 
with them, and they shall be His people." 13 

With many the life of heaven seems to be re- 
garded as the antithesis of whatever has been dis- 
agreeable or trying in this world, or as the en- 
larging and intensifying of the joys of earth which 
are now most appreciated. This way of forming 
our notions of future life is more natural than trust- 
worthy. The heaven of our Sioux Indians is the 
happy hunting-grounds, where game is abundant, 
and where the disturbing feet of white men never 
come. The paradise of the Koran is a prolonged 
carnival of sensuality, well suited to the instincts 
of the average Mussulman. Not a few of the hymns 
which are sung in devotional meetings overflow 
with sentiments about heaven, and at the same time 

" Rev. xxi, 1. is jbid^ xxj^ 3. 



104 Is the Lord Among Us? 

teach a carnal theology. Rothe regarded his daily 
correspondence as drudgery. This led him to say 
that, to him, one of the charms of the heavenly 
life was the fact that there would be no letter- 
writing there. 19 He gave a much better idea of 
the "saints' rest," when he said, "We shall be sur- 
rounded by realities, and, best of all, we shall be 
real ourselves."" 

The poverty of language adds embarrassment 
to our concepts of heaven. When the missionaries 
first visited the Sandwich Islands, they found no 
word in the language of the natives which would 
express the idea of everlasting happiness. The 
nearest equivalent which they could find was a word 
which indicated the intense satisfaction derived 
from eating putrid meat. To what a disadvantage 
did this place the teachers of the kingdom of God ! 
Even Paul could not tell what he perceived when 
he was so lifted up that he became unconscious of 
bodily habiliment. The passage does not mean 
that he was forbidden to report what he saw ; he 
was simply unable to do it. There was no analogue 
in human speech which would enable him to con- 
vey his thought. We are compelled to think 
through material analogies. It is easier to fasten 



19 Still Hour, p. 48. 20 Ibid., p. 49. 



Are We Au, Going to Heaven? 105 

to the symbol than to the thing signified. We may 
readily substitute the form for the substance. We 
come to think the form is the substance, and con- 
tend for it as the all-essential. It thus often becomes 
true of us, 

"Notions, like coins, we prize as they grow old; 
It is the rust we value; not the gold." 

Heaven is a natural, not an artificial, adjust- 
ment. Fitness is the principle upon which it will 
be bestowed. Jesus told James and John that, in 
His kingdom, no honors were conferred arbitrarily 
or from favoritism. If they would drink of His 
cup and stand with Him in His baptism, they need 
have no trouble about their future. Christ makes 
His people "meet to be partakers of the inheritance 
of the saints in light." 21 "To St. John heaven is not 
an abode of bliss in a scene of which we can form 
no clear conception, but the spiritual atmosphere in 
which, alike on this side the grave and on the other, 
the saints live and move. The dwellers upon earth 
are not those who simply tread its firm soil and 
breathe its atmosphere, but those who are worldly 
in their spirit and whose views are bounded by the 
things of time." 22 The more quickly we dismiss 
from our thought the notion that scenery and SUr- 
^Col. i, 12. 22 Expositor's Bible on Rev., p. 355. 



106 Is the Lord Among Us? 

roundings constitute the essentials of heaven the 
better. God could not create circumstances in which 
a soul alienated from Him could realize blessedness. 
Heaven is not essentially in place or time. It can 
not be in golden streets nor gates of pearl, nor 
angel-choirs ; it is the eternal law of antecedent and 
consequent worked out in character and destiny. 
No walls keep in or keep out, save barriers in char- 
acter and relations to Jesus Christ. The life that 
now is and that which is to come are not separated 
by either a logical or a theological chasm. Christ 
in us is both the hope and the essence of glory. In 
present salvation Christ is not educating us for an 
eternity of sight-seeing, but for oneness with God 
and fellowship with all the holy. "Heaven is holi- 
ness raised to a higher power." 

It seemed necessary to say this much concern- 
ing ideas of heaven before attempting to answer 
the question, Are we all going to heaven ? We may 
now say that there are some facts which, in them- 
selves, look as though we should all find our way 
to heaven. 

I. We can all be in heaven. The conditions of 
admission are simple, such as all can comply with. 
Your past sins need not necessarily bar you out. 
The offer of forgiveness is universal and free. The 



Are We Aix Going to Heaven? 107 

atonement in Christ is sufficient for any and for 
all. God accepts it as satisfactory to Him ; we may 
all accept it as sufficient and be at peace with Him. 
Our habits of sin, however strong, may all be bro- 
ken — broken forever. There is One who is mightier 
than our bondage; He can deliver us. We are not 
compelled to sin. Reader, if you forget all else in 
this sermon, do not forget this : you need not sin; 
Christ can save you from sinning. Your circum- 
stances may be trying, but they do not compel you to 
be immoral or impenitent. You can enter the king- 
dom of heaven ; you can enter now ; you can re- 
main there forever. This fact in itself would in- 
cline us to believe that we are all going to heaven. 
2. God wants us all in heaven. He made us 
to live with Him in heaven. No will or decree of 
His will ever keep any of us away from heaven. 
He is constantly working to bring us into that state. 
He calls us ; He pleads with us to come to Him. 
When we go away from Him He follows us as a 
mother seeks a wandering child. We grieve Him 
by our impenitence. Hell is no more of His will- 
ing than is the delirium of the dying drunkard. 
He seeks companionship with man. We wrong 
Him when we refuse to enter the kingdom of 
heaven. True, He does not want us in heaven in 



108 Is the Lord Among Us? 

a sinful, unrepentant state. That would be an im- 
possibility. Impenitence and heaven, both as terms 
and as states, are mutually exclusive. There is, 
there can be no heaven for impenitent souls. God 
seeks to bring us into states in which heaven is 
possible to us. He has no pleasure in the death 
of the wicked. He longs for the salvation of us 
all, and His desire that we all enter heaven would 
encourage us to think that we shall all go to heaven. 
3. We are all needed in heaven. There will be 
none too many in the life and service of heaven if 
we are all there. There is an appropriate work 
for each of us there — a work chosen of God for us. 
We shall be the means of blessing to many if we 
are there. A multitude of good beings want us to 
come there. We are known and remembered and 
talked about in heaven. We wrong the society of 
heaven if we neglect to go there. There is joy 
in heaven when a sinner repents and enters the 
kingdom of heaven. We are all needed in the mil- 
itant side of this kingdom. Here is a work as- 
signed you which no other can do. If you are a 
husband, know that no other person on the earth 
can help your wife save her soul as you can, if you 
are in the kingdom yourself. Children need Chris- 
tian parents more than they need Sunday-schools 



Are We Ale Going to Heaven? 109 

or Bibles. Neighbors wrong one another when they 
are not Christians. All this would look as though 
we were going to heaven without exception. 

4. We are under the strongest possible induce- 
ments to go to heaven. To fail of this is to be un- 
true to ourselves. It is failure in everything. Life 
can hardly be said to be worth living if it begins, 
proceeds, and ends in alienation from God. Stu- 
pendous folly and excuseless sin mark the life of 
every soul who does not enter heaven. Our duty 
to God appeals to us. If we fail to go to heaven, 
we waste His mercies and turn His gifts against 
Himself. Our sense of justice to our fellow-men 
demands that we go to heaven. All that unselfish 
love can speak, and all that justice and righteous- 
ness mean, call upon us to make sure of the king- 
dom of heaven. Such inducements placed before 
reasonable beings would lead us to expect that they 
would all go to heaven. 

5. But while these facts would seem to justify 
the expectation that we are all going to heaven, 
there are some others which cast a very dark shadow 
over this hope. The kingdom of heaven, in its 
militant state, is here on earth, and many have never 
entered it. The kingdom on earth and in the heav- 
ens is essentially the same. In both its lower and 



no Is the Lord Among Us? 

upper sides it has the same King and the same 
laws. The kingdom as it exists on the earth is 
the entrance to the higher phase in heaven. The 
conditions of entering in both are the same; the 
door of the spiritual kingdom on earth is just as 
narrow and just as wide as the gate of heaven. 
That which debars from one excludes from the 
other. The Divine order in entering can not be 
reversed by any of us ; the militant must be entered 
before the triumphant can be reached. The en- 
trance is on earth. If you are now outside the spir- 
itual kingdom on earth, there is a reason for it, and 
the same reason would keep you from the kingdom 
in the heavens. Whatever keeps you from Christ 
here, would keep you from Him there, for He is 
the same in all worlds. Our relation to Him now 
is as much a reality as it can ever be. Your accept- 
ance with God here is recognized and indorsed in 
heaven. If you live in the militant kingdom a lit- 
tle longer, you will graduate into the higher life 
of the kingdom triumphant. Jesus besought the 
people to seek the kingdom of God before bread or 
clothing ; but many do not do it. They are outside 
the entrance. 

6. The law of adaptation is likely to obtain 



Are We Ale Going to Heaven? hi 

throughout the spiritual worlds. If heaven is not 
"the survival of the fittest," it is the arrival of the 
fitted. It can not be doubted that many are un- 
fitted for the heavenly state. Heaven is holy so- 
ciety, and there are those who do not love that 
which is holy; least of all do they seek the com- 
panionship of holy people. They dread rather than 
delight in the presence of God. They do not enjoy, 
nor so much as enter, His service. The writer to 
the Hebrews represents heaven as a "Sabbath-keep- 
ing." Many do not keep the earthly Sabbath in a 
heavenly way. If the short Sabbath here is to them 
drudgery and the occasion of folly and dissipation, 
what would they do with an unending Sabbath ob- 
servance? In heaven the name of God is hallowed; 
but many here toss His name from their lips in 
the most trivial and irreverent manner. All heaven 
worships Christ, but we see many who make little 
or nothing of Him; they reject His invitations, and 
mock at His atoning sacrifice. Can such a viola- 
tion of the law of adaptation ever exist under the 
government of God, as would be required in order 
to introduce an unsaved, ungodly soul into the so- 
ciety of saints and holy angels? Indeed, it is the 
false notion which wicked men entertain concern- 



ii2 Is tiik Lord Among Us? 

ing heaven which leads them to expect or so much 
as desire to be there. This looks as though many 
were not going to heaven. 

J. Jesus said to this inquirer, "Strive to enter 
in." He warned him to get himself ready. He 
wanted him to be in earnest about his preparation. 
That was our Lord's idea of going to heaven, — 
the preparation for heaven, and as the preparation 
is the going, they are not going. They appear to 
be getting ready for something entirely different 
from heaven. They do not pray; they are not on 
speaking terms with God. They do not claim to 
have an acquaintance with Jesus Christ. Heaven 
could be no home to them. Instead of striving to 
be like the people in heaven, they go on in sin, and 
become more and more like those in hell. Some 
who claim to be getting ready for heaven, appear 
to be little in earnest about it; they seem more 
in earnest about other things. They make their 
religion compatible with almost anything which 
they desire to do. At most, this is only "seeking 
to enter in." This is not getting ready ; they "shall 
not be able." Think for a moment what a heaven 
some would require in order to meet the demands 
of their present state, and then say if we are all 
going to heaven. 



Are; Wj; Au, Going to Heaven? 113 

Remarks. 

1. Men are often deceived in this world by 
thinking that happiness is the result of external con- 
ditions. They carry this misleading notion into 
their ideas of heaven. They think of it chiefly as a 
place. Their care is not so much about becoming 
heavenly in life and spirit, as about getting to a 
certain place. They fail to see that what would 
be paradise to one might be perdition to another. 
We can trust the Heavenly Father to adjust exter- 
nal conditions to His glorified children; but heaven 
is first of all a spiritual state. 

2. The expectation of going to heaven is almost 
universal among those who have any settled views 
of the future state. We have known many wicked 
men, but very few who did not expect in some way 
to get into heaven after death. This expectation, 
when joined with heavenly character, is well 
founded, and precious in its influence and consola- 
tion. When based upon nothing more than the 
selfish desire to have the best of everything, it wiil 
prove delusive. When Miss Frances Willard 
breathed out her life in the words, "It will be so 
beautiful to be with God," we can easily see whither 
she was going. There was but one place in the 

universe for her; that olace was with God. A 
8 



ii4 Is the Lord Among Us? 

wicked man once strolled into a religious meeting, 
and after sitting uneasily for some time, arose, 
saying, "I want to get out of here; let me out of 
here; God Almighty is too near." It was just as 
easy to see where he was not going. "Tell them," 
said Bishop Hamline, "I had heaven before I 
died." 23 God gathers into His kingdom here all 
whom He can persuade to meet the necessary con- 
ditions, and brings to the fellowships of heaven all 
whose lives are hid with Christ in God. 

" The Church triumphant in thy love, 
Their mighty joys we know; 
They sing the Lamb in hymns above, 
And we in hymns below." 24 



23 Biog. Bp. Hamline, p. 330. **Meth. Hymnal, No. 765. 



VII. 

GOD'S ESTIMATE OF MAN. 

"For it became Him, for whom are all things, and 
by whom are all things, in bringing many sons 
unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation 
perfect through sufferings." — Heb. ii, 10. 

This text says that such is the magnitude of the 
interests involved in human salvation, that it was 
fitting for God to sacrifice all that He sacrificed, and 
that Christ should suffer all that He suffered in 
order to save man. This appalling statement indi- 
cates the estimate which God places upon His crea- 
ture, man. He for whom are all things, and by 
whom are all things; He who made man, and who 
knows more about him than all other beings in the 
universe, regards the sacrifice of His Son, and the 
unspeakable sufferings He endured, as becoming in 
Him, considering what man is, and what he may 
through Christ become. 

This view of man as a being of transcendent 
115 



n6 Is the Lord Among Us? 

worth appears frequently in Scripture statement. 
He was "made a little lower than God;" he was 
the crown and glory of creation ; he was made ruler 
of all orders of being below himself — the repre- 
sentative of God in his reign in the earth ; "God is 
"mindful of him;" He "visits him;" 1 God "sets 
His heart upon him." 2 Redeemed men are the breth- 
ren of Jesus Christ, of whom He is not ashamed; 8 
they, and not angels, are the conspicuous agents 
in carrying on the purposes of God in redemption. 4 
This judgment of God concerning the exalted 
rank and worth of man presents a striking contrast 
when compared with. the estimate which men gen- 
erally place upon themselves and their fellows. 
True, the Bible does not extol human goodness. It 
finds man fallen into ruin; more deeply fallen still 
below what he might have been, and in deepest 
depth of all below what he may become. It is his 
high rank, and his unmeasured possibilities upon 
which the Word of God insists, and these are the 
facts which are so often ignored. Men incline to 
regard themselves as a kind of second edition of 
brutes. They practice accordingly, giving reign 
to their animal natures, and treating their fellows 
as if each was only "the brother of the ox." These 

i Psa. viii, 4-6. (R. V.) 3 Job vii, 17. 8 Heb. ii, 11. 

*Idid., ii, 4, 5. 



God's Estimate: of Man. 117 

degrading views of man help to degrade him still 
further. They sink his ideals, they lower his aims, 
they cheapen his life, and blind his eyes to his high 
calling in Christ Jesus. If right ideas of God are 
essential to true religion, truthful ideas of man are 
equally necessary to intelligent piety and proper 
manhood. 

If low notions of man cheapen life and work 
unrighteousness, the Divine declarations concern- 
ing him work towards his elevation and salvation. 
They lift him up into the thoughts of God. They 
point to the life which man was made to live, and 
the fellowship with his Maker which he is capable 
of enjoying. Civilizations are higher or lower ac- 
cording to their practical estimates of human in- 
terests. Wrongs against man disappear only as the 
worth of man comes to be realized. Reforms are 
born of awakened convictions concerning the value 
of human well-being. Slavery fell when the Negro 
was seen to be, not a chattel, but a man. The rising 
war against the barbarism of the liquor traffic is 
inspired by an apprehension of the fact that man 
is too valuable to be burned to a cinder in the fires 
of his appetites, or to be made the beast of burden 
on which godless greed may ride into ill-gotten 
wealth. 



n8 Is the: Lord Among Us? 

Those religions in which man stands as a thing 
and not as a person, neither elevate nor save the 
race. The gospel itself can not be explained but 
upon the assumption of the infinite worth of man, 
and Christianity is propagated with becoming 
earnestness only where this worth is recognized. 

Illustrations of the Divine estimate of man are 
not hard to find. 

i. This world was made for man. Science and 
the Bible agree in this, and there is no meaning 
to the world upon any other supposition. It was 
a long journey through which the Creator took this 
earth of ours, from star-dust, through molten sea 
to cooling crust, and blooming vegetation; but the 
journey was made for man. All the cataclysms 
and transformations, the submergences and up- 
heavals, all the living and the perishing were only 
a preparation for the coming and life of man. They 
were the prophecy that such a being as man was to 
take possession of the world. The coal mines, so 
long in construction, are but the bunkers in which 
Divine Providence stored the fuel needful for his 
comfort and development. No other being which 
has lived on the earth could have discovered either 
its existence or its uses. Man is a lover of knowl- 
edge; study is a condition of his improvement, and 



God's Estimate of Man. 119 

the world in which he lives is filled with mysteries 
which tempt his curiosity and excite his power 
of invention. He is an aesthetic being, and his world- 
home is adorned with exhibitions of art, which are 
beyond the power of human genius to conceive. 
The beautiful, the sublime, and the useful, which 
could appeal to no other being on the earth but him- 
self, are continually speaking to him in the language 
of God. While you are reading this book you are 
seemingly at rest, and yet you are moving at a 
rate of speed a thousand times higher than that of 
the railroad train. No king or millionaire can boast 
of such a chariot as that in which you are this mo- 
ment seated. Rapid as is its movement, incalcu- 
lable as is its freightage, no axle breaks, the power 
never fails ; and though passing unnumbered trains, 
through all the ages there has been no collision. 
And what meaning is there to all this? For whom 
is all this infinite outlay of skill and power? Why 
should the Creator have brought the world through 
all this marvelous history? Why has He so nicely 
adapted it to the highest necessities of man? Is it 
not to tell us that, as He estimates values, the well- 
being of man is weightiest of all? The world was 
made for man; possibly the worlds were made for 
him. 



120 Is thu Lord Among Us? 

2. Man stands as the climax in creation. Here 
again the Bible and science teach the same. Both 
maintain that creation has proceeded from the lower 
orders to the higher. The history of animal life 
upon this planet of ours has been a long one, and 
has never been fully read ; but this much is certain : 
man appeared latest in the order of time; he is a 
"sixth-day" product. 5 The movement in creation 
being from the lower orders to the higher, man 
appearing last, is highest in rank; he stands at the 
head. Agassiz has somewhere said that the spinal 
cord in the earliest vertebrates was horizontal, the 
elevation of the head not being above the level of 
the backbone. In orders which appeared later, the 
extremity of the spine, which we call the brain, 
was lifted from the horizontal towards the perpen- 
dicular. As the process went on other forms ap- 
peared with oblique spines; but at each step the 
spinal angle approached more nearly the perpen- 
dicular. In man alone the vertical spinal cord was 
reached. As there can be nothing more perpen- 
dicular than perpendicular, this would seem to in- 
dicate that man not only stands at the head of cre- 
ation now, but also that he is the final term in the 
ascending series. No higher order will supersede 

6 Gen. i, 26-31. 



God's Estimate: of Man. 121 

him. On, on through the coming ages, the highest 
created being in the universe will be man, man re- 
deemed and lifted up to the Divine idea of man- 
hood. The "new heavens and the new earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness/' 6 will be peopled with the 
redeemed from among men. If "the whole creation 
groaneth and travaileth in pain together," it is be- 
cause it awaits "the manifestation of the sons of 
God." 7 Highest in rank among the creatures of 
God, no other wears such honor, no other bears such 
responsibilities, or is within reach of equal priv- 
ileges. And here is indicated God's estimate of 
His creature — man. 

3. Turn to the only record of creation which we 
have, and what is there indicated in reference to 
the rank of man as a creature of God ? This record 
is brief beyond parallel; whole ages drop down be- 
tween the lines. Mountain-peaks of the story only 
are seen; but when the creation of man is reached, 
the account is given in detail. "And God said, Let 
us make man in our own image, after our likeness ; 
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, 
and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, 
and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing 
that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man 

•2 Pet. iii, 13. 7 Rom. viii, 19-22. 



122 Is the Lord Among Us? 

in His own image ; in the image of God created He 
him; male and female created He them." 3 This 
drawn-out account of the creation of man, so in 
contrast with what goes before it, reads as if in- 
spiration itself was taking a long breath and saying, 
"Now is revealed what all these ages and this in- 
finite labor has been for. Now is given the whole 
interpretation of creation. " "Man is the fulfillment 
of the prophecies of all ages." 9 

This record states that man was invested with 
dominion over all the lower orders in creation — 
God's representative on earth. Facts echo the state- 
ment. Man began his career among animals, which 
in size and strength, were greatly his superiors. He 
drove the bear and lion from their resorts, and 
appropriated their dwelling-places to his own use. 
He invented weapons before which his monster 
enemies could not stand. As his race has spread 
over the earth, the beasts of the field have fled 
before him, or they have been made to do him serv- 
ice. They have perished, but man remains. They 
have been limited to certain areas of the earth's 
surface, and, in /the presence of great cjlimatic 
changes, have become extinct. Man lives in all 
countries, and survives all catastrophes, and his 

« Gen. i, 26, 27. 

9 Walks and Talks in the Geological Field, p. 302. 



God's Estimate; of Man. 123 

dominion becomes more and more complete as cen- 
turies pass. 

The record states that God made man in His 
own image. This can not refer to his physical 
form, and yet in this even there is an intimation of 
man's supreme rank in creation. In his erect pos- 
ture nature seems to have completed a period in that 
direction. No other being than man needed such 
a body, and no other could have availed itself of 
its manifold uses. In systems or idolatrous wor- 
ship the gods are represented by brute forms; but 
in the religion of the Bible this is never the case. 
In the theophanies of the Old Testament the human 
form only was used as the vehicle of Divine mani- 
festation, and in the New Testament and in Christian 
art of all ages, angels are represented as in human 
form. Our Lord himself "was made in the like- 
ness of man." 10 

This image of God in which man was created 
evidently refers, not to his outward form, but to his 
essential self. Like his Creator, he is a spirit. He 
knows and feels and wills. He remembers, and thus 
lives in the past. He can speak and reveal his 
thoughts. Like his Creator, man is invisible; we 
see only the house in which he lives — the machinery 

10 Phil, ii, 7. 



124 Is the Lord Among Us? 

with which he touches the external world. Man is 
mind; he can think and reason. The marvelous 
achievements of modern science are but the product 
of human thinking. "Man leaps from star to star, 
as hunters step from bog to bog in crossing a mo- 
rass." 11 He alone among the creatures of the earth 
is incapable of indefinite improvement. This is the 
index finger which points to his immortality. In out- 
ward form man stands at the point of completion. 
But with this finishing of the physical, nature seems 
to have begun a new ascending series in the mental. 
Here no index points to a termination. Mind does 
not halt in its development. 

This record of creation places man in relations 
which involve consequences of incalculable impor- 
tance. He is installed as the head of the fundamen- 
tal institution of society — the family. He is asso- 
ciated with God in the perpetuation of his species. 
His relations are such that he transmits to follow- 
ing generations his physical characteristics and men- 
tal tendencies. In living one life he lives many 
lives. Once in the world, he never gets out of it. 
He sends down the current of human blood the taints 
of his vices or the purer influence of a well-ordered 
life. 



11 Man's Value in Society, p. 102. 



God's Estimate of Man. 125 

This image of God includes the perilous en- 
dowment of moral freedom. Alan originates his 
own moral acts. He is not the helpless victim of 
his environment. He is not compelled to sin, and no 
power in earth or heaven can force him to stop sin- 
ning. He can say yes to God everywhere and al- 
ways, and he can everlastingly say no. No strength 
of temptation can ever oblige him to do wrong, 
and no amount of persuasion can compel him to do 
right. In this world and in all worlds he carries 
the responsibility of his own conduct and destiny. 
God reasons with him, but claims no power to in- 
vade the freedom of his will. He can choose, intend, 
purpose, as he shall elect, despite all the seductions of 
the world, the flesh, and the devil, and in the face 
of all the tender expostulations of friends and the 
entreaties of the Holy Spirit. God appeals to man's 
ideas of justice, of right and wrong, as if they must 
be the same with His own, but concedes his free- 
dom in accepting or rejecting His commands and 
promises. In the exercise of this exalted power, 
man can unite himself to God or forever separate 
himself from Him. 

Man's capacity for happiness and misery are in 
proportion to his greatness. The more exalted his 
nature, the higher and more intense may be his 



126 Is the Lord Among Us? 

enjoyments, and the more deep and appalling may be 
his sufferings. There are some forms of animal life 
so low down in the scale of being that they give 
little or no evidence of a capacity of physical suffer- 
ing. Higher in the scale this capacity increases, 
and it is highest of all in man. The higher in the 
scale, the greater the capacity for enjoyment, and 
here as elsewhere, man stands at the highest point. 
Physical pain, fearful as it can be, and sometimes is, 
is the least of his possible sufferings, as pleasures 
of sense are the smallest of his possible enjoyments. 
With conscience and reason and memory and sense 
of obligation, man is endowed with all the condi- 
tions of the highest blessedness or of the deepest 
wretchedness. What wonder that God should re- 
gard his welfare with all the yearnings of infinite 
love? 

4. God is revealed to the world in many ways. 
He is the speaking God. He speaks in His works and 
in His Word. Every truly Christian soul does, in 
a measure, reveal God. But the highest revelation 
of God is in Jesus Christ. He is the Word of God — 
the spoken God. "God, who at sundry times and in 
divers manners, spake in time past unto the fathers 
by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto 
us by His Son." 12 Jesus says Himself, "He that hath 

WHeb.i, 1. 



God's Estimate of Man. 127 

seen Me, hath seen the Father." 13 We make no at- 
tempt at philosophizing here. Like a multitude of 
facts, the number of which the study of both sci- 
ence and revelation is constantly increasing, this fact 
involves mystery. Let it suffice to say that we do 
not teach as some of our unbelieving critics repre- 
sent, that Jesus Christ was God plus man, nor that 
He was man plus God. We hold that He was the 
God-man. Neither a second God, nor a double Per- 
son; but God manifested in man. Man, then, is of 
such an exalted nature that in him God can disclose 
Himself to the world. God can live in a human 
life. We can know who and what God is in know- 
ing Jesus Christ. There was some good reason 
why, "not of angels doth He take hold, but He tak- 
eth hold of the seed of Abraham." 14 His first strong 
grasp of humanity was in His incarnation. Verily, 
the image of God in which man was created must 
be very real. The relationship of God to man, and 
of man to God is not appreciated. The possible fel- 
lowship between the child and the Divine Father 
must rise far above our usual visions of glory. This 
fellowship, broken of! by sin, with every man awaits 
restoration in the willing acceptance of Jesus Christ. 
And what does this say in reference to the nature 

» John xiv, 9. " Heb. ii, 16. (R. V.) 



128 Is the: Lord Among Us? 

and worth of man? What possibilities of spiritual 
life, and of everlasting union with the Father of our 
spirits ! Who can measure the magnitude of the 
disaster when a human soul loses intercourse with 
God? The Bible strikes the exact truth when it 
declares that a soul who has lost God is himself 
lost. Who shall wonder that the God of love has 
pronounced His sacrifice and suffering in Jesus 
Christ as fitting in order to win man back to Him- 
self. And who that catches but a glimpse of the 
infinite worth of man can longer marvel that the 
Holy Son of God consented to take upon Him the 
anguish of Gethsemane, and the agonies of the cross, 
thinking only of the joy that was set before Him — 
the joy of redeeming the lost race of man to God. 

Unbelievers have sometimes said that Jesus 
Christ was only a good man; no more Divine than 
other men, excepting that He was better than most 
men. But what must humanity be to have produced 
even one such character and life as that of Jesus 
of Nazareth? If Jesus was human and no more, 
why has humanity, through all its history, failed 
to bring forth another? On the other hand, if the 
Christ of the New Testament be real, He is Divine. 
Then what must man be to have received such a 
manifestation of God upon a human plane, and what 



God's Estimate; of Man. 129 

must be man's relation and likeness to God to have 
rendered the fact of the incarnation possible ? 

Remarks. 

I. Low estimates of the rank and value of man 
are damaging to the character and life of those who 
accept them. Many seem to enjoy whatever de- 
grades man as a creature of God. They dwell upon 
his infant helplessness; they mock the frailty and 
brevity of his life ; they ridicule his ignorance, and 
they gloat over his animalism. They have little to 
say of his high origin, or of a possible destiny still 
higher. They make nothing of his nobility of na- 
ture, or of the coronation with which he was in- 
troduced to the headship of the world. His faults 
are paraded and laughed at from the platform; he 
is cartooned in the public press and burlesqued in 
the theater. 

Estimating man thus, they treat him accordingly. 
They attach little importance to what he is or what 
he may become. They have small pity for his fallen 
condition, and less expectation of his permanent 
reformation. Not a few make merchandise of his 
honor, and grow rich upon his vices. They make 
nothing of God's estimate of man. True, we now 
see man in ruins. His sins, with all their weight of 
9 



130 Is the Lord Among Us? 

woe, are upon him. But like a broken statue, he tells 
of what he might have been, and predicts what he 
may become. For the one who may read these 
lines we devoutly pray, "Lord, open his eyes, that 
he may see what God thinks of him." This blest 
vision will reveal the greatness of life, and make 
room in the heart for the yearnings of a loving 
Savior over His children lost. 

2. We have said that man, in his present state, 
is a spirit in a body — an angel in a brute. This fact 
places us face to face with a practical problem of 
surpassing importance to every individual of the 
race. Which of these factors in our nature shall 
become the ruling element is the question of ques- 
tions with every one of us. If the animal becomes 
dominant we go down. If the spirit gains and main- 
tains the victory over the flesh, we go up. No law of 
physical science is more certain in its action and 
results than this. If revelation had been silent upon 
the subject, the fact would be no less true. Here is 
a battle which none of us can escape. Coward or 
hero, you are forced to stand upon this field. As 
truly as Paul fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, 
every man has a lion to fight. In the Church or out 
of it, he is summoned to this encounter. With none 
of us will it be a drawn battle. It is to conquer or 



God's Estimate of Man. r3i 

to be conquered. To be victorious is life ; to be de- 
feated is death. It will not help us in this conflict to 
stay out of the Church ; it will be fatal to us to reject 
the help of Christ. You will never win this battle 
alone. 

3. In the boundless beyond man will evidently 
stand higher or he will fall lower than any other 
created being. Last made, he is highest made. He 
is incapable of any ordinary destiny. For him the 
worlds were made and furnished ; for him the Bible 
was written; for him Christ died. Through him 
the problem of sin and redemption is to be wrought 
out. Heaven rejoices over his repentance; angels 
minister to him in his earthly pilgrimage. All this 
means corresponding outcome. To be one of the 
human race is great; it is grand, and it is awful. 
And through all the ages to come, it will be greater 
and more glorious still, or more terrible to have been 
a man, made in the image of God, and redeemed 
through Jesus Christ. 

" We, for whose sake all nature stands, 
And stars their courses move ; 
We, for whose guard the angel bands 
Come flying from above ; 

We, for whom God the Son came down, 

And labored for our good ; 
How careless to secure that crown 

He purchased with his blood I" 16 

15 Meth. Hymnal, No. 547. 



VIII. 

DOUBTING. 

"And when they saw Him, they worshiped Him; 
but some doubted." — Matt, xxviii, 17. 

The appearances of our Lord to His disciples 
after His resurrection were generally unannounced 
and unexpected. The one alluded to in the text 
is an exception. The place, and proximately the 
time, had been fixed by previous appointment. Prob- 
ably upwards of five hundred gathered on the 
"mountain in Galilee." They saw Him; He con- 
versed with them and the greater part of the 
number were alive to tell the delightful story when 
Paul wrote his First Epistle to the Corinthians. 

Many of the company recognized Him, and pros- 
trated themselves before Him. A few doubted. It 
was a great thing to believe, that one whom they 
knew to have been dead, was alive and speaking to 
them. It seemed too good to believe. Probably 
some looked upon Him there for the first time, and 
132 



Doubting. 133 

He may not have presented the appearance which 
they had anticipated. To those who had seen Him 
often before the crucifixion, He must have appeared 
quite unlike His former self. It argued well for 
the reasonableness of this company that some 
doubted. They were not credulous; they did not 
believe merely because others did; they looked the 
matter up for themselves. As a result their doubts 
were temporary, and it is to the credit of the writer 
of this Gospel that he could write the facts in the 
case, though they seemed to reflect upon those of 
his own company. 

Christ is still in the world, worshiped by many, 
but by some doubted. Christianity has been in the 
world for a long time. It has made marvelous head- 
way against great obstacles. The number of those 
who accept it as of Divine authority has been con- 
stantly increasing, and yet there are those who doubt. 
If the honest doubter could see why he doubts, it 
might lead him to believe. We will try to give the 
reasons why some people doubt. 

I. We begin our beliefs upon almost all subjects 
by being taught that certain things are true. At 
first we do not grasp firmly or widely the reasons 
which support these truths. Quite possibly we could 
not do it ; it is equally possible that our teachers did 



134 Is the Lord Among Us? 

not see fit to give us the reasons which were in their 
own minds, and it is not improbable that reasons 
which would satisfy us later on, were not possessed 
by the teachers themselves. This order of receiving 
our beliefs at the first through others in whose wis- 
dom and honesty we have confidence is all right. 
It arises necessarily out of the incapacity of child- 
hood. It is the opportunity of parent and teacher ; 
it is God's arrangement for the salvation of the child. 

In the development of the mental life every 
thoughtful person reaches a period when he seeks 
reasons for his beliefs. He is no longer satisfied 
to receive them upon the indorsement of others. 
This, too, is normal and necessary. Inherited be- 
liefs, do not, as a rule, take a sufficiently strong grip 
upon the life. It is only when personal convictions 
are wrought in us that our beliefs mean what they 
say. Men will toy with their sentiments ; their lives 
are often inconsistent with their creeds; but honest 
men will die for their convictions. 

This period of transition is, with every man, a 
critical period. Several ways are open before him. 
He can shut down on investigation, refuse new light, 
and become a traditionalist, and nothing more. He 
can make up his mind to believe just as he always 
has believed. This may result in simple stagnation 



Doubting. 135 

In mental and spiritual life. It may lead on further 
to a narrow and spiteful bigotry, and to a defense 
of personal beliefs which, in positiveness and ve- 
hemence, is in inverse ratio to their depths. To 
such the criterion of truth is former belief, and the 
sure mark of a falsehood is that it has been newly 
discovered. 

On the other hand, in this time of questioning, 
men may leap to the conclusion that every alleged 
truth for which they can not at once discover ample 
proof, must be false. They may think it necessary 
to their self-respect to throw away all they have 
been taught, simply because it was received through 
teaching. To them the old is all false, and the new 
is true so far as it disputes the old. The criterion of 
truth is antagonism to tradition, and the enemies 
of the race are the fossils who believe as their fa- 
thers did. There is a middle way into which these 
questioning souls should be guided ; viz., the way of 
calm, fearless, and thorough investigation. This 
period of hunger for personal convictions should be 
respected. An honest doubter is likely to become a 
confirmed believer. 

If he is told that because he doubts he is a sinner 
and an infidel; that, if anything can, will lead him 
to be both. I have often heard it said that the trend 



136 Is the; Lord Among Us? 

of thought in the better class of our young men 
is towards infidelity. I do not believe the state- 
ment. Our thinking young men are seeking intellec- 
tual rest in religious belief. There is no good reason 
why they should be rebuked for this. When the 
young man goes home from his school with his head 
full of new questions, questions born of his quick- 
ened intellectual vigor, gives his Christian testi- 
mony with fewer adjectives, and less emotional 
fervor, let his pastor and Christian friends beware 
how they tell him that he has become backslidden, 
and is half way a skeptic. He knows it is not true. 
He is after reasons for his faith. Help him, and he 
will get them, and when he has them, he will be 
worth a score of those who have never thought 
enough to make a doubt possible. "Doubt well, 
young man, and then believe forever." 

2. Doubting is often the result of a feeling that 
there is less responsibility in doubting than in be- 
lieving. Much historical and scientific truth is 
readily accepted, for if it be true, no change is re- 
quired in us because of it. It is not so with religious 
truth. When a man accepts the doctrine of a Per- 
sonal God as true, he can not stop there. He can not 
say, "That is nothing to me." He must go on and 
ask, in reference to His nature and His relation to 



Doubting. 137 

himself. He must do something about it, or he must 
stand self-convicted in the presence of his own be- 
lief. It is an uncomfortable position to stand ar- 
raigned at the bar of one's own convictions of truth. 
Men seek to escape the self-accusation involved in 
such a mental attitude. They do not want the re- 
sponsibility of denying the truth of Christianity; 
they know what it means to admit its Divine origin, 
and it is a relief to them to seem to occupy a middle 
ground where they neither affirm nor deny, but only 
doubt. It is all the easier for them to assume this 
attitude, because they can say that they have never 
had opportunity to investigate the subject suffi- 
ciently to warrant a positive belief either way. A 
moment's thought should convince us that there is 
no such middle ground as the doubter supposes. 
The doubter must take the responsibility of his 
doubts. His doubts lead him to treat Christianity 
as if it were false. If his doubts have any meaning, 
they mean that the truth of Christianity is not 
proven. If his doubts have no basis in reason they 
are a self-imposed fraud; if they have a reasonable 
basis, then Christianity is unreasonable. In any 
case, he takes all the responsibility which he would 
take in either accepting or rejecting it. Nor has he, 
as an honest man, the right to push the religion of 



138 Is the Lord Among Us? 

Christ aside as unworthy of his first attention. In 
that he assumes the responsibility of practically re- 
jecting it. 

5. Doubting often arises from ignorance of the 
Bible. This applies first of all to the cheap jesters 
and retailers of infidel jibes and sarcasms. They 
have, perhaps, read an infidel tract, or heard a lec- 
ture in the same line ; they know not how to answer 
the criticisms upon the Bible which they hear or 
read, for they know little or nothing of the Bible 
itself. They have not read it; they do not even 
know how to study it. It would be amusing, if it 
were not so serious in its results, to hear men talking 
pompously of the contradictions and inconsistencies 
of the Bible when, to save their souls, they can not 
distinguish between prophets and evangelists, nor the 
books in the Old Testament from those in the New. 
Is it any wonder that men, thus ignorant of what 
they talk about, are led into doubt? We do not 
mean that men must become profound scholars in 
order to know that Christianity is from God; they 
need be little more than honest men, in earnest to 
know and live the truth. But we do say that, be- 
fore men proceed to pronounce the evidences of 
Christianity inadequate, and the faith of God's 
Church for thousands of years a delusion, they 



Doubting. 139 

should take pains to know something of the Book 
which contains the question at issue. The Bible 
does not ask to be let alone ; it asks no quarter at any 
honest man's hands. It courts investigation; the 
more the better, if it be done to find out the truth. 
But for any man to bandy it about with ridicule and 
flippant criticism, while ignorant of its contents, 
is an impeachment of his honor and a prayer for 
self-delusion. 

Nor does this charge of ignorance concerning 
the contents of the Scriptures lie exclusively against 
the rabble of infidelity. It is surprisingly just as 
against some of the leading doubters of the past and 
the present time. 1 Edward Gibbon was the author 
of a work entitled "A History of the Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire." The books are satu- 
rated with insinuations against the Christian re- 
ligion. The author is somewhat boastful of his 
painstaking thoroughness in the matter of authori- 
ties, and yet he admitted that he made up his mind 
in reference to the Bible by reading the Gospel of 
John and one chapter in Luke. What chance did he 
give himself to know what was in the Bible ? When 
David Hume wrote his "History of England," he 
let slip no opportunity of hurling a dart at the re- 
ligion of the Bible; but he told Samuel Johnson 

1 Unbelief in Eighteenth Century, p. 25, etc. 



140 Is the Lord Among Us? 

that he had never read the Bible with attention — 
not even the New Testament. Thomas Paine wrote 
a book misnamed "The Age of Reason." The book 
is a scurrilous attack upon the Bible, and in a style 
which panders to the rabble. I have heard young 
men speak of it as a book which "shows up the 
Bible." And yet this book shows that Paine did 
not know who were the twelve apostles, and when 
his misquotations were published, he defended him- 
self by saying, "I had forgotten just how the printers 
left that passage, for I keep no Bible." And the man 
who for years trod the platforms of this country 
as the most irreverent assailant of the Bible and 
Christianity since Voltaire, when asked by a reporter, 
"Have you made the Bible the subject of thorough 
study?" replied in these words, "I have read the 
Bible some, and I have heard it talked about a good 
deal." We do these men no injustice in pronounc- 
ing them ignorant of the Bible. They manifest 
an equal ignorance of the religion which it teaches. 
Books on Christian evidences are numerous. They 
range from five-cent tracts to massive volumes. 
How many of these has the average doubter read? 
What wonder that men doubt so long as they con- 
sent to remain ignorant of what the Bible is and 
what it teaches ? 



Doubting. 141 

4. In this question of the Divine element in the 
Bible and of the Divine origin of the Christian re- 
ligion, men often demand a form of evidence which 
is not applicable in the case, and because this is not 
given, they doubt. They call for demonstration. 
They want to know Christian truth as they know 
that five times five are twenty-five. They wish for 
evidence which will compel belief. In the demand 
for this kind of evidence there are errors. The form 
of evidence, which we call demonstration, can apply 
to only one class of truths ; viz., mathematical truth. 
It is confined wholly to truths which relate to mag- 
nitudes and numbers. The thousand and one truths 
upon which we practice in daily life are none of them 
capable of demonstration, and yet men would be re- 
garded as unbalanced if they did not accept them. 
Besides, truths demonstrated are not believed; they 
are known. There is a difference between belief 
and knowledge, though that which is believed may 
be as true as that which is known. That two par- 
allel lines can not inclose a space is not a belief ; it 
is knowledge. When apprehended by the mind, it 
is impossible not to know it. Belief is based upon 
moral evidence, and there is often a moral element in 
believing. Moral states have a part in forming be- 



142 Is the Lord Among Us? 

lief. Compelled belief has no moral element. The 
want of demonstration is no excuse for doubting. 

5. A corrupted Christianity has led many to be- 
come doubters. In periods in which the Church has 
lost spirituality, and in which her ministry has been 
unfaithful and worldly, unbelievers have been mul- 
tiplied. The more intelligent classes in a whole na- 
tion have at times recoiled from the Church, and 
thus from what they had mistaken for the religion 
of Christ. Witness the condition of France at the 
present time. In communities in which there are 
Church quarrels and alienations among those who 
profess to be Christians; where business men in the 
Church are full of greed and sharp practices; and 
where the life of the Church is frivolous and self- 
pleasing, there will be many doubters. A backslid- 
den Church and a self-seeking ministry is the soil in 
which unbelief flourishes. The same fact appears 
in the lives of individuals. Employees in the serv- 
ice of men who claim to be Christians, sometimes 
find that their employers deceive their customers, 
and instruct them to do the same. They find them 
greedy of gain and hard-fisted towards those who 
serve them; they charge these inconsistencies to re- 
ligion, and turn away unbelievers. In homes where 
piety is coupled with harshness and ill-tempers; 



Doubting. 143 

where criticism and fault-finding are served with the 
daily meals; where the Bible and prayer are sup- 
planted by games and novels ; where professions are 
large and practical life is small; in such homes chil- 
dren and servants will count it a luxury to be doubt- 
ers. It is said of the Emperor Julian, who put forth 
all his strength in an effort to crush Christianity 
and re-establish Paganism in the Roman Empire, 
that he was turned against the religion of the cross 
by the wrongs which he suffered at the hands of 
those who avowed the Christian faith. 

6. The occasions of doubt are not unfrequently 
in the doubter himself. There is in some a pride 
in doubting. The silly notion is entertained that 
doubt signifies that one is profound and original, 
as if faith was not as original as unfaith. Some 
gratuitously assume that faith and reason are oppo- 
sites; that they exclude each other. They appear 
to think that, to believe is to assent without evidence, 
but that to disbelieve is to act reasonably. Faith, 
they would have us believe, is imitative, while un- 
belief is original. All this is sheer assumption; it 
has not the merit of plausibility, but it operates in 
many minds to dignify doubt. To conceive of one's 
self as a superior thinker, or as the follower of those 
who are original and profound, is flattering to in- 



i44 Is the Lord Among Us? 

tellectual pride. There is a state of mind which 
desires that Christianity may be proven false. It 
wishes to free itself from the authority of Divine 
revelation. Christianity accuses men of sin ; some 
resent the charge, and place themselves in the atti- 
tude of striking back. The desire to have Chris- 
tianity untrue becomes father to the thought. They 
reason according to desire instead of desiring ac- 
cording to reason. Such will easily doubt. A wicked 
life will generate doubt. No man will very long 
maintain a high creed joined with a low life. He 
will either bring his life up towards his creed, or 
his life will drag down his creed towards its level. 
Sensuality kills the moral sense. That men who live 
on the plane of self-gratification should be stupidly 
unconscious of spiritual realities, is certainly not 
to be wondered at. That they should mistake this 
benumbed moral sense for originality or ''advanced 
thought," is indeed surpassingly strange. They 
should be able to discover that their doubts arise, 
not from profound thinking, but from a repugnance 
of feeling towards that authority which demands 
self-renunciation and a holy life. 

7. We have already noted (Sermon V) that there 
is an overdrawn theory of inspiration which ex- 
poses the Bible to technical criticism. This theory 



Doubting. 145 

virtually concedes that an error in the Scriptures 
would overthrow the claim to inspiration. All al- 
leged errors must be regarded as assaults upon the 
Divine character of the book, and must, in some 
way, be shown to be correct and harmonious state- 
ments of truth. If, in First Kings, we read that the 
pillars in front of the temple of Solomon were 
eighteen cubits high, and in Second Chronicles that 
they were thirty-five cubits, there must, it is thought, 
be some explanation which will harmonize these 
figures. This view, wholly unnecessary for the de- 
fense of Scripture inspiration, leads to strained in- 
terpretations, and unsatisfactory explanations of 
various passages. These apparently forced expla- 
nations are taken to be devices resorted to in order 
to save the doctrine of inspiration. The inference 
is that the doctrine itself is lacking in proof. At 
this point doubts are multiplied, and without cause. 
The true idea of inspiration, indicated by the Word 
itself, and implied in the Scriptures, has no need to 
carry this load of difficulties. It dissolves rather 
than creates doubt. And is it not strange that men 
will insist that this yoke of mechanical inspiration 
shall be put upon the neck of Christian apologetics — 
a yoke which neither we nor our fathers were able 

to bear? 
10 



146 Is the Lord Among Us? 

8. Recent developments in the science of psychol- 
ogy have shown that some of the phenomena, more 
or less connected with religious experience, are ac- 
counted for in philosophical ways. Here new doubts 
have arisen, and some have been ready to leap to 
the conclusion that all there is in what Christians 
call conversion, is only the natural influence of mind 
upon mind, matter upon mind, and external condi- 
tions upon both body and mind. "There goes the 
supernatural," they say, "and we doubt if there is 
anything Divine in the conversion of a sinner or the 
experience of a saint." In this doubt there appears, 
first of all, the besetting delusion, before alluded to, 
in the first discourse in this volume ; viz., that when 
we have found out how God works, we take that fact 
as proof that it is not His work at all. The notion 
that we must count God out of every effect for 
which we can assign a secondary cause, and that He 
is to be counted in only in the miraculous or ex- 
traordinary, is a Deistic abomination which should 
be banished from the thought of every thinking man. 
What if psychology does reveal the fact that certain 
mental phenomena connected with conversions can 
be traced to specific causes? That does not remove 
God from either the effects or the causes. 

Besides, it is well if we have come to know that 



Doubting. 147 

changes in religious feelings, so often construed 
as the criteria of fundamental moral changes, are 
not always the result of the bestowment or the with- 
drawal of the Holy Spirit. Light has long been 
needed upon this subject. We need it to enable 
ministers and people to distinguish what is real and 
essential in conversion from what is superficial and 
incidental. Our converts would be more genuine 
and less fluctuating in their experiences. Our 
Churches would now be filled with more spiritual fiber 
had this light been clear upon us in years gone by. 
There is little doubt that we have overlooked much 
of the work of the Holy Spirit among us, because 
we have recognized nothing as His working which 
did not appear in certain manifestations which we 
had fixed for Him in our thought. And there is 
just as little doubt that, in our religious exercises 
and services, we sometimes attribute to Him that 
to which He has no other relation than He has to all 
other mental and physical phenomena. For all the 
light which psychology has shed upon this subject, 
Christians above all others, should be grateful to 
God. It is a light shining in, what to thousands 
has been a dark place in experience. There is no 
suggestion of doubt here. And after we have gath- 
ered in all the light we can get from mental sci- 



143 Is the: Lord Among Us? 

ence, we only see a little more clearly how God 
works in saving men. He works by law in both 
nature and grace. He brings man into fullest co- 
operation with Himself. In every genuine conver- 
sion an orphan soul finds his Father; a lost son re- 
turns and is received into communion with God. 

9. Reader, in the last analysis, your doubts come 
from a cold unconsciousness of God. Were this 
removed from your heart, all other sources of doubt 
would be powerless. God made you to know Him ; 
He wants you to live with Him ; He wants to live 
with you. You may become as conscious of Him as 
you are of yourself. You may walk the street, live 
in your home, and stand in your place of business, 
knowing always that He is with you. In such a 
companionship your doubts will melt away like an 
April snow. You may question and argue till the 
day of doom, and still be harassed with the ghosts 
of your unbelief. The one final cure of your doubt- 
ing is to know God. The way is through Christ; 
at His feet the Holy Spirit will meet you; He will 
show you to yourself; He will introduce you to 
Christ? Have you tested this? If you have, you 
know I am telling you the truth. If you have not, 
come, and you shall doubt no more forever. 



IX. 

UNBELIEF IN CHRISTIAN PEOPLE. 

"Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an 
evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the liv- 
ing God." — Heb. iii, 12. 

The: chapter in which this text stands makes 
reference to an important event recorded in Old 
Testament history. 1 In their journey from Egypt 
to Canaan, the Hebrews had reached a point near 
the southern border of the Promised Land. Here 
they sent forward twelve men with orders to make 
observations concerning the country and the peo- 
ple, and report the result to headquarters. At the 
expiration of forty days these scouts returned, bring- 
ing with them specimens of the fruits of the land. 
At first all agreed that the country was charm- 
ing and bountiful in its products. But ten of the 
number presented a most discouraging picture of 
the difficulties in the way of possessing it. They 



l Num. xii, 14. 

149 



150 Is the Lord Among Us? 

had seen walled cities, and the sight was new to 
them. They had caught sight of military fortifi- 
cations and disciplined soldiers. These soldiers ap- 
peared to them to be remarkably large and strong, 
and they realized that the enginery necessary for 
the reduction of such strong defenses was not in 
the Hebrew camp. 

The congregation had been waiting for more than 
a month in a state of excited expectation, and when 
they heard these unfavorable tidings, brought in by 
ten of the spies, they swung to the opposite extreme 
of utter discouragement. Two faithful men of the 
number attempted to still the despairing cries of the 
multitude, but were unable to stay the tide of dis- 
heartened feeling. The fitful crowd were first for 
stoning their leaders and returning to Egypt, and 
then for attacking their enemies contrary to orders, 
and without prospect of success. 

The true inwardness of this story is opened up 
by the writer of this Epistle to the Hebrews. It was 
not the city walls, formidable as they must have been 
to men armed only with swords and bows ; it was 
not the number or the giant stature of the Canaan- 
itish soldiers which stood in the way of their con- 
quest of the land ; it was the fact that they did not 
believe that God would do as He had said He would. 



Unbelief in Christian People. 151 

By their unbelief they had separated themselves 
from the leadership of God. They could not con- 
quer their enemies without Him. It was their un- 
belief which caused their failure, and doomed them 
to a long and wasting pilgrimage in the desert. 
Moses saw this fact, and, in his farewell address, ex- 
plained to them that their prolonged wilderness 
journey was brought upon them because they "did 
not believe the Lord their God." 2 The writer of 
this epistle says, "So we see they could not enter 
in because of unbelief." 3 

Using this as a memorable instance in which the 
unbelief of a few worked the ruin of many, he ex- 
horts Christian believers who, like the Hebrews 
in the wilderness, are called to meet difficulties, and 
to do what is impossible to them unless led and at- 
tended by the presence of God, to take heed, lest 
they, too, give way to unbelief, and thus separate 
themselves from their Divine Leader. 

Of unbelief as a theoretical rejection of the Bible 
and the Christian faith, we have spoken in the pre- 
ceding discourse. There is another aspect of un- 
belief, however, which is hardly less serious to the 
cause of Christ. It is the practical unbelief of Chris- 
tians themselves. They accept Christianity; they 

•Deut. i, 32. 8 Heb. iii, 19. 



152 Is the Lord Among Us? 

believe the Bible; they admit that God speaks to 
men ; that He has made promises, but they treat His 
promises as unreliable. They would be shocked to 
be told that they had ever manifested any want of 
confidence in the honesty and sincerity of Jesus 
Christ, and yet they do treat Him as if He does not 
mean what He says. This exhortation of the apos- 
tle is to such as profess belief in God and faith in 
Christ as a Savior, but who, in the presence of dif- 
ficulties, fail in courage, and, through unbelief, 
separate themselves from the living God. Let us 
look for some of the more common manifestations 
of this form of unbelief. 

I. We have not far to go to find good people 
who have little confidence that right will triumph 
in this world against wrong. They see that money 
and cunning and numbers are often enlisted on the 
side of wrong, and they are quite sure that these 
obstacles are so great that they can not be over- 
come. They hate the atrocious evils which they 
see intrenched in custom and godless greed; but 
they say their removal can not be accomplished. 
They wish that reforms could triumph; but they 
have no real expectation that they ever will; at 
least, not within an indefinitely long time. Good 
people talked this way in reference to slavery; they 



Unbelief in Christian People. 153 

knew it was wicked, but what could be done about 
it? It could never be abolished; it would destroy 
the Union to attempt it. Some men had faith, and 
worked on. They believed that God was with and 
in the right and against the wrong. At one time it 
looked as though the nation was nearing the bor- 
ders of emancipation, but reports came in from the 
newspapers, from Congress, and from the Methodist 
Discipline that the destruction of slavery was out 
of the question. Men were soon ready to stone the 
Abolitionists and to return to the Egyptian bond- 
age of the Fugitive Slave Law. Years were spent 
in the wilderness of political gaming, and the plague 
of war fell upon an unbelieving people, and prac- 
tically wasted a whole generation. We hear the 
same despairing utterances concerning present evils. 
Thoughtful men everywhere know that the traffic 
in intoxicants menaces all that Christians and pa- 
triots hold dear; but many will say that it can not 
be stopped. They see that its defenders are or- 
ganized; that they are unscrupulous in methods; 
that every base and wicked thing is marshaled in its 
support; that politicians truckle to its interests, and 
they have no faith that it can be exterminated. 

These obstacles in the way of reform are very 
real, and they are very great. The kingdom of God 



154 Is the Lord Among Us? 

has always been confronted by great obstacles. Hu- 
man devisings have never been sufficient for its suc- 
cess. Human strength alone has always been weak- 
ness. But our chief difficult) is our unbelief. Do 
we believe that this world is organized for a glori- 
ous outcome of universal righteousness? Do we 
believe that Jesus Christ is in this world, success- 
fully guiding its history towards this consumma- 
tion? With this confidence shall we despair of the 
final result ? Difficulties there are ; human weakness 
is very apparent, but human weakness makes room 
for God. That God who charged all men to beware 
and not oppress the widow and the fatherless ; that 
God who pronounced a curse upon him who should 
put the bottle to his neighbor's lips — that God lives; 
and as surely as He lives, the hoary-headed abom- 
inations of earth, which have so long corrupted so- 
ciety, and destroyed the bodies and souls of men, 
will go down. The mouth of the Lord hath spoken 
it. Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you 
an evil heart of unbelief, which measures difficul- 
ties by human rather than by Divine strength. 

2. The fear of loss as the result of obeying God 
is an indication of unbelief. The man who works 
on Sunday when the Word of God tells him to ob- 
serve it as a Sabbath rest, does it because he dares 



Unbeuef in Christian People. 155 

not trust God to direct his business methods. He 
thinks he can do better for himself than God will 
do for him. The business man who, from the fear of 
losing patronage, shuts his mouth over the gross 
evils in his community, dares not do his duty and 
trust God to take care of him. Why do young men 
fear that they can not succeed in life if they are 
strictly conscientious? Why do men fear that they 
shall damage their prospects if they ally themselves 
with unpopular but righteous causes? Why do 
many young people follow customs which they blush 
to defend as right ? Is it not that they fear the loss 
of friendships and social standing? These and 
many other forms of this fear of loss by obeying 
God, are simply manifestations of unbelief. Such 
persons are unwilling to obey Christ and trust His 
guidance and protection. They thus separate them- 
selves, their business, and their social life from 
Him. As the apostle puts the case, they depart from 
the living God. 

The old Hebrew kings, with a few exceptions, 
did not dare to trust Jehovah to direct in the man- 
agement of state affairs; they thought they must 
keep on good terms with the gods of the nations. 
The penalty came in the destruction of their king- 
doms. The difference between the false prophets 



156 Is the Lord Among Us? 

and the true was prominently this : the former 
cringed before any apparent loss as a consequence 
of speaking God's messages; the other were true 
to their commission, and trusted Jehovah to take 
care of them. We dislike to admit that any pro- 
fessed minister of the gospel will trim his ministry 
to a worldly policy from fear of loss in doing his 
duty. Were there not too much evidence that such 
cases exist, we would withhold the insinuation. 
Wherever the case exists, it is one of the most la- 
mentable manifestations of unbelief. We do not 
deny that, in all these cases, faithfulness may in- 
volve temporary suffering, but with Christians, the 
greatest of all losses is the loss of conscious integ- 
rity before God. He is no minister of Christ who 
parts with this. His ministry will from that time 
be a corpse from which the spirit and life have fled. 
A frigid eloquence may for a time linger upon 
his lips, but his real gifts will die, paralyzed by his 
unbelief. 

3. When a Church and pastor cease to expect the 
conversion of souls through the ordinary means of 
grace, it is a manifestation of unbelief. We need 
not stop to prove that such instances exist; they 
are numerous. In many Churches little effort seems 
to be put forth for the salvation of men, excepting 



Unbelief in Christian People. 157 

at periods of special services. The members appear 
to think that if the Church can hold its own till 
another "revival-meeting/' it is all that can be looked 
for. In the meantime the gospel is preached, and 
various services are held fifty-two Sundays in the 
year ; prayer-meetings, class-meetings, and young 
people's meetings are conducted every week, but with 
little or no expectation that any one will be awak- 
ened and led to Christ through these means. By a 
kind of common consent, something of an unusual 
character must be arranged in order to bring per- 
sons to a sense of sin and salvation. Meetings must 
be increased in number to five or ten in a week, and 
extraordinary attractions must be announced before 
conversions can be expected. 

We do not wish to be understood as teaching 
that there are not appropriate times for protracted 
meetings. Such services have often been greatly 
blest, and it is also true that instances can be easily 
cited in which they have closed, leaving the Church 
more dead and the community more hard than when 
they began. But why should the expectation of con- 
versions be limited to these special occasions? Is it 
anywhere revealed that the Holy Spirit works with 
a Church only in special meetings ? If the minister 
be a man of God, and a preacher of the gospel, will 



158 Is the I^ord Among Us? 

not the Holy Spirit be in his ministry constantly? 
If he teaches his people to observe all things what- 
soever Christ has commanded, does not the prom- 
ise, "Lo, I am with you always" (all the days), mean 
the minister now ? Can a Church prescribe the time 
and place and way in which the Holy Spirit will 
work upon the souls of men? If "altar services" 
are thought to be absolutely essential, can they not 
be held at one time as well as another? And to 
whom has it been revealed that men can not be led 
to Christ in any other place than the church build- 
ing? It would seem that some Churches have little 
confidence in the reality of conversions unless the 
persons have come out in the traditional place and 
way. The fact is, we are attempting to do our 
Christian work too exclusively inside the doors of 
our churches. Special seasons of home visitation 
may result in as great good as special services in the 
church. Half the time and labor used in a series of 
meetings, given by the Church and her minister to 
home evangelization, would often result in greater 
and more permanent good. In not a few cases it 
would prove effectual with persons who would never 
be at an altar service or even in a protracted meet- 
ing. We shall not solve the problem of "the Church 
and the masses" till the Church goes after the 



Unbelief in Christian People. 159 

masses. We venture to predict that hundreds of 
men and women in our congregations would be 
brought to Christ every year if the work of the 
Holy Spirit, in the ordinary services of the Church 
was sought out and diligently followed up. The 
Holy Spirit is constantly at work in our congrega- 
tions and communities. We are to work with Him, 
adopt His way; not insist that He shall come to 
ours. Not a Sunday in the year, if the minister 
means what he says, and the Church realizes her 
mission to men, but souls will be hunted out by 
the Spirit of God and brought to know their need 
of Christ. Then why should the expectation of con- 
versions ever cease in the life of a Church? Why 
should it be limited to a special season of a few weeks 
in the year, a season designated frequently more 
by the signs of the zodiac than by "the sound of 
going in the tops of the mulberry-trees." 4 If we 
are not mocking the Holy Ghost in repeating the 
Apostles' Creed, we should expect His presence in 
the services of to-day, next Sunday, next Thursday 
evening — all days and all evenings. Take heed, 
brethren, lest there be in any of us — ministers and 
members — an evil heart of unbelief in departing 
from the living God. 

4. Unbelief is manifested in individual religious 

*2Sam. v, 24. 



160 Is the Lord Among Us? 

life in a hunger for external marvels and internal 
sensations. Like the unbelieving Jews, many unbe- 
lieving Christians seek after a sign. They want 
something to indicate that God is as good as His 
word. They do not feel that it is altogether safe 
to trust God for what He is, or for what He says. 
In personal religious life their desires are centered 
upon a blessing — an experience. They conceive of 
a religious experience as something which Christ 
does, rather than as something which He is to the 
soul and life of the believer. They have some faith 
in prayer, still more in religious feeling, and most 
of all in instances of physical prostration and cases 
of faith-cure. 

Their faith keeps just one step away from the 
Savior Himself. If they were told that these long- 
ings for inward and outward marvels were indica- 
tions of unbelief rather than of faith, they would 
think it an unpardonable severity of criticism; but 
such is the case. Faith receives a personal Christ. 
It goes with Him ; stands with him ; relies upon Him. 
When one begins to lean upon some impersonal "it," 
be the it external miracle or inward state, he that 
moment begins to unloose his hold on Christ. It is 
just at this point that many have given way to an 
evil heart of unbelief. 



Unbelief in Christian People. 161 

5. Unbelief may be recognized in the legal state 
in which many professed Christians live. Their re- 
ligious life consists in making resolutions to do bet- 
ter. They fail and fail again, until, in moments of 
despair, they feel that they have not the face to tell 
God that they expect to do any better than they 
have done. Duty is to them, not only difficult, but 
irksome and unwelcome. They try doing this and 
doing that, as experiments, hoping for help in means, 
but rinding all unsatisfactory. Conscience is to them 
not so much a guide as a goad. Now, what is the 
cause of all this bondage and misery — this Mount 
Sinai experience of blackness and darkness and 
tempest ? Whether they know it or. not, these strug- 
gling souls are attempting to meet the demands 
of the law in their own persons and strength. Their 
unbelief has separated them from the living Christ, 
and they are alone in their weakness and bondage. 
Would they for one moment cast away all their 
works, experiences, promises, feelings — everything 
but the living Christ — the day of their deliverance 
would dawn. They would see that, in having Him, 
they have all. It is their unbelief which keeps them 
trusting in things rather than in Him, "of Whom 
and through Whom and to Whom are all things." 5 



6 Rom. xi, 36. 
II 



1 62 Is the Lord Among Us? 

6. It is unbelief that leads persons to think that, 
in their religious lives, there are special and insu- 
perable difficulties. They think others have fewer 
obstacles in their way, and can get on more success- 
fully than they. They view themselves as peculiar, 
and their circumstances as unusually embarrass- 
ing. Their natural disposition is against them ; their 
tempers are magazines of fury; they have special 
trials at home; they have old habits which betray 
them; their business leads them into associations 
with wicked men ; for these and a hundred other 
hindrances, which they deem peculiar in their force 
upon themselves, they half justify much in them- 
selves which is not Christian. Their halting and 
sinning is, they think, what is to be expected of 
those of their make-up and surroundings. Let us 
admit all these difficulties, and many more if we 
will ; still the notion that there are any cases so pe- 
culiar that Christ has not made full provision for 
them, is purely a suggestion of an evil heart of un- 
belief. Reader, you are counting yourself to be sep- 
arate from the living God. What are your diffi- 
culties when placed in the hands of an Almighty 
Savior? Can you be anywhere or under any con- 
ditions in which Christ is not enough for you? Will 
He fail you when you cast yourself upon Him? As 



Unbeuef in Christian People. 163 

well say that the Gospel was not meant for you, and 
that the plan of salvation did not take you in. When 
Jesus died saying, "It is finished," 8 He had His 
eyes upon you. He knew where you would live, 
what would be your constitution and your surround- 
ings. He knew what habits you would have to break 
up, what trials and temptations would come upon 
you ; yes, He knew it all, and yet He said, with you 
in His eye, "It is finished/' Will you look at Him 
and say, "He can not do it in my case?" This is 
unbelief; it separates you from the living Christ. 
It is not a misfortune ; it is a neglect ; it is sin. Let 
us haste to His feet; confess that we have dishon- 
ored Him by distrusting His love and power, and 
cast ourselves upon Him for time and eternity. 



6 John xix, 30. 



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